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Chestnuts, Puree Of
Take fifty large chestnuts--those are the best which have no division, and, when the skin is removed, are entire. Take off the outer brown skin, and boil the chestnuts until the inner skin will come off easily, when that also must be removed. Having done this, put the chestnuts into a saucepan with sufficient white stock to cover them, and boil them gently until they are quite soft, when they must be pressed, while hot, through a wire sieve. The pulp must then be put into a stewpan, with a piece of butter about the size of a walnut, a cupful of cream or new milk, half a cupful of the stock in which they were simmered, and a little salt, pepper, and sugar. Stir this over the fire until quite hot, when it may be placed in the middle of a dish of cutlets. Time, two hours. Probable cost of chestnuts, 3d. or 4d. per pint. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A straightforward savoury chestnut purée, built on stock rather than the sweetened version sold in tins today. The work is almost all in the peeling.
- QuantityThe recipe gives no weight, only a price per pint. Fifty large chestnuts is somewhere around 1 1/2-2 lb / 700-900 g in the shell, yielding perhaps 1 1/4 lb / 550-600 g of peeled nuts. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts will stand in and remove nearly all the labour.
- The two skinsThe hinge of the recipe. The glossy outer shell comes off after scoring a cross in the flat side; the bitter inner pellicle only releases while the nuts are hot, so work in small batches and keep the rest in the hot water. Cooled chestnuts have to be re-heated before the skin will lift.
- "No division"Chestnuts that are single and unlobed inside the shell — marrons rather than the flattened multiple kernels — peel whole and are worth seeking out for this reason alone.
- White stockA pale unroasted veal or chicken stock. Any light chicken stock works; avoid dark brown stock, which muddies both colour and flavour.
- Butter the size of a walnutAbout 1 oz / 30 g. "New milk" is simply fresh whole milk, unskimmed.
- SievingA food mill or potato ricer does the job of the wire sieve in a fraction of the time and gives a better texture than a blender, which can turn the purée pasty.
- TimingThe book gives only "Time, two hours," which presumably takes in the whole operation, peeling included. The simmer in stock is likely to need only 20-30 minutes, until a nut crushes under a spoon; overboiling only waterlogs them.
- ServingServes four to five as a garnish, mounded in the centre of a dish of cutlets; the recipe does not say what meat. It stiffens as it cools, so finish it last and take it to the table hot.
Chestnuts occupied a different place in the nineteenth-century larder than they do now: cheap, sold by the pint like a grain, and used as a starch as much as a treat — Cassell's quotes threepence or fourpence a pint. Across the chestnut belt of southern Europe, from the Cévennes to Tuscany, they had long been dried and milled into flour where wheat would not grow, and the purée is the domestic, unmilled version of the same idea. Its appearance here as a bed for cutlets follows French practice, where purée de marrons was a standard accompaniment to roast and grilled meats and to game; the sweetened chestnut purée familiar from tins today belongs to a separate line of descent, though sweetened chestnut preparations themselves are long established. The insistence on undivided nuts reflects a distinction still made in the trade between marrons, which fill the shell as a single kernel, and ordinary chestnuts that split into lobes and are correspondingly fiddly to skin.