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CHESTNUTS, STEWED (to be served as a vegetable)
Remove the outer rind from sound chestnuts, then fry them in a little butter, when the inner skin may easily be freed from them. Put them into a saucepan with some good stock, and boil them until they are tender but unbroken. The chestnuts should be removed from the gravy as soon as they are cooked, and served in a tureen with a little white sauce poured over them. Time to boil the chestnuts, one hour and a half. Probable cost, 3d. or 4d. per pint. Sufficient, one quart for a tureenful.
A straightforward side dish, but the stated cooking time belongs to a different era of chestnut and should be ignored.
- The time is the problemNinety minutes will reduce peeled chestnuts to mush and defeat the recipe's own instruction that they stay unbroken. Simmer gently and start testing at 20 minutes; most are tender at 25-35 minutes depending on size and dryness. Keep the liquid at a bare simmer, since a rolling boil knocks them apart.
- PeelingScore an X in the flat side of each nut before it meets the butter — the shell and the bitter inner pellicle both come away far more willingly from a hot nut, and both must go. Work in small batches and peel while warm; cooled chestnuts cling to their skins.
- Substituting vacuum-packed chestnutsReady-peeled cooked chestnuts skip the frying and peeling entirely, but they are already tender. Warm them through in the stock for 5-8 minutes only, then lift them out.
- "Good stock"A light veal, chicken or vegetable stock, unsalted or lightly salted, since it will concentrate. Enough to cover the chestnuts by an inch. The strained cooking liquid is worth keeping for soup or for thinning the sauce.
- White sauceA plain béchamel: 1 oz butter, 1 oz flour, about 1/2 pint milk, cooked out for several minutes so it does not taste of raw flour. Loosening it with a spoonful or two of the chestnut stock ties the dish together.
- Quantities and yieldA quart measure of chestnuts is perhaps 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb in the shell, giving somewhat over a pound peeled, or roughly six modest side servings; the recipe does not say whether its quart is measured shelled or unshelled. The "probable cost, 3d. or 4d. per pint" is a Victorian market note with no modern equivalent.
- TureenThe recipe directs service in a tureen at table; if covered, it keeps the nuts hot and slows the sauce skinning over. Any warmed covered dish does the same job.
Sweet chestnuts were a genuine vegetable in nineteenth-century British cooking rather than only a Christmas stuffing ingredient, and this recipe sits among the vegetable dishes accordingly — starchy, mild and served in sauce much as one might serve salsify or Jerusalem artichokes. Southern Europe had long treated the chestnut as a staple starch, and Britain imported Spanish and Italian nuts each autumn. The method here, frying briefly in butter to loosen the skins before simmering, is one Victorian solution to a job that remains the most tedious part of cooking chestnuts; the hour-and-a-half boil is contradicted by the recipe's own warning to keep the nuts whole.