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Chestnuts, Compote Of
Take thirty large chestnuts, peel off the outer brown skin, and put them into a saucepan of cold water. When the water is just on the point of boiling, take them out, remove the second skin, and be careful not to break the chestnuts. Make a syrup with a breakfast-cupful of water and a quarter of a pound of sugar, adding a glass of sherry and the rind of half an orange or a lemon, cut very thin. Put the chestnuts into this, and let them simmer gently for twenty minutes. Strain the syrup over the chestnuts, and serve hot. Sift a little sugar over them. Time, about forty minutes. Probable cost, chestnuts, 3d. or 4d. per pint. The above quantity will make a moderate-sized dish.
A straightforward chestnut compote, but the whole dish stands or falls on the peeling. Everything else is a gentle sugar syrup.
- The hinge: peel while hotThe inner skin (the pellicle) only lifts cleanly while the nut is hot and damp. Work on a few at a time, keeping the rest in the hot water, and re-warm any that cool and refuse. Score each shell with an X before the first heating and the outer skin comes away far more easily.
- Breakfast-cupfulA breakfast cup in Victorian usage is roughly 8 to 10 fl oz, so take it as 1 to 1¼ cups of water. A quarter pound of sugar is about ½ cup plus 2 tablespoons of granulated.
- A glass of sherryUnspecified, as ever. A wine glass of the period was around 2 fl oz; ¼ cup of medium or cream sherry suits the syrup without making it thin or overtly boozy.
- Simmer, do not boilTwenty minutes at a bare tremble keeps the nuts whole. A rolling boil will knock them apart, and once broken they cannot be put right. The syrup should barely move.
- Citrus rindPare the zest in wide strips with a peeler and take no white pith. Remove the strips before serving unless you want them as decoration.
- Fresh chestnuts onlyThis needs raw chestnuts in the shell, sold in autumn and winter. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts are already soft and will disintegrate in twenty minutes of simmering; if that is all you have, warm them through in the syrup for five minutes at most.
- Finishing the syrupIf the syrup is still watery at the end, lift the chestnuts out, reduce it by a third, then pour it back over. The recipe's "sift a little sugar over them" means a dusting of caster or icing sugar just before it goes to the table.
- YieldThe recipe claims only 'a moderate-sized dish'; thirty chestnuts would serve about four as a dessert.
Chestnut compotes and their more laborious cousin, marrons glac erence confectioner's repertoire, come out of the French confectioner's repertoire, where the sweet chestnut of the Lyon and Ard èche country was candied in progressively stronger syrups over several days. Cassell's version is the domestic shortcut: one syrup, twenty minutes, served hot rather than crystallised. The costing tells you how chestnuts reached a Victorian kitchen — "3d. or 4d. per pint" means they were sold loose by volume, cheap street and market produce in autumn, the same nuts that roasted on braziers on London corners.