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Chestnut Soup
Take off the outer rind from fifty chestnuts, and put them into a saucepan of cold water. Place them on the fire, and when the water is just upon the point of boiling, take them out and remove the under skin. Stew them in sufficient stock to cover them, until quite tender; put them in a mortar, and pound them to a paste, reserving a dozen to be placed whole in the soup just before it is dished. Pound with the paste two table-spoonfuls of bread-crumbs, two tea-spoonfuls of salt, half a tea-spoonful of pepper, and half a nutmeg grated. Mix with it very gradually the stock in which the chestnuts were boiled, if its sweetness is not objected to, allowing a quart of the mixture and a pint of milk to every quart of stock. Boil all together once more, with the chestnuts which were reserved, and if the soup is too thick, add a little more stock. Before serving, place some fried sippets in the tureen. The stock may be either made from meat or from vegetables alone. Time, two and a half hours. Sufficient for eight or nine persons. Probable cost, exclusive of the stock, 10d. per quart.
A straightforward purée soup that predates the food processor; the only fussy part is the peeling, and there is a modern shortcut for that.
- How many chestnutsFifty chestnuts in the shell is roughly 2 lb / 900 g, yielding about 1 lb 5 oz / 600 g peeled nuts. Vacuum-packed or jarred cooked chestnuts substitute directly at the peeled weight — use unsweetened ones, not marrons glacés or sweetened purée.
- The two skinsThe outer shell comes off with a knife; the bitter inner pellicle is what the near-boil is for. Work in small batches and peel while hot, because the pellicle grips again as the nuts cool.
- UnitsA quart is 40 fl oz / 1.1 litres in the British measure this book uses, a pint 20 fl oz / 570 ml. Stock quantities here are elastic anyway, since the soup is thinned to taste at the end.
- The liquid ratio is ambiguous"A quart of the mixture and a pint of milk to every quart of stock" reads as circular, since the mixture is itself mostly stock. Treat it as a guide to consistency rather than arithmetic: aim for roughly two parts liquid to one part chestnut paste by volume, then adjust.
- Mortar to blenderA blender or stick blender does in a minute what the pounding did in twenty, and the breadcrumbs are then largely unnecessary as a thickener — keep them only if you want the slightly grainy body of the original. Pass through a sieve if you want it silky.
- NutmegHalf a whole nutmeg grated is somewhere around one to one and a half teaspoons, which will dominate a chestnut pur easpoon and add more at the end.
- SippetsSmall squares or triangles of bread fried in butter or dripping — croutons, essentially. Put them in the bowls rather than the tureen so they stay crisp.
- Timing and yieldThe stated two and a half hours is mostly peeling and stewing; with pre-cooked chestnuts the soup comes together in half an hour. It serves eight to nine as a first course, four to five as a main.
Chestnuts were a starch crop long before they were a treat: in the mountain districts of Italy, Corsica, southern France and parts of Spain they were dried, milled into flour and eaten as bread and polenta. That cheapness is why a soup like this sits alongside pea and lentil u2014 the "probable cost, exclusive of the stock, 10d. per quart" is the point of the entry as much as the flavour. The recipe's careful aside about the sweetness of the cooking liquid, "if its sweetness is not objected to", suggests that a faintly sweet chestnut soup was not to every taste. Sippets, the fried bread served in the tureen, are the older word for croutons.