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Spanish Chestnut Soup
Take fifty large Spanish chestnuts. Throw them into a pan of warm water, and when this is hot enough to burn the fingers take the nuts out, peel and scrape them, and throw each one as it is done into a pan of cold water. When all are ready, wipe the chestnuts, cover them with good stock, and let them simmer gently till they break when touched with a spoon or fork. Drain and crush them, mix with them a quart of stock, and rub the soup through a fine sieve. Add as much salt, cayenne, and mace as will flavour it pleasantly. Boil it up again, mix with it off the fire a quarter of a pint of boiling cream, and serve immediately. If its sweetness is not objected to, the whole or part of the stock in which the chestnuts were boiled may be added to the soup. If brown soup is preferred instead of white, the chestnuts, after being scalded, peeled, and scraped, may be steamed with two ounces of butter, a sliced onion, half an ounce of loaf sugar, and a little pepper and salt. When tender, they should be drained and crushed, mixed with a quart of good brown gravy, and then boiled and rubbed through a fine sieve reversed. The puree, when made hot, will be ready for serving. Time to boil the chestnuts, three-quarters of an hour. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A Victorian purée soup that stands up well, provided the cream goes in off the heat and the chestnuts are properly peeled. Everything else is a matter of translating imperial measures and old-fashioned nut handling.
- What a Spanish chestnut isCastanea sativa, the European sweet chestnut, called Spanish in British books to distinguish it from the inedible horse chestnut. Fifty large ones is roughly 1.5-2 lb in the shell; shelling and skinning loses about a fifth of that.
- PeelingThe scalding method works, but scoring an X through the shell of each nut first makes both the shell and the bitter inner pellicle come away far more willingly. Work on a few at a time and keep the rest hot; cooled chestnuts cling to their skins. Vacuum-packed peeled chestnuts are a legitimate shortcut and need only 20-25 minutes of simmering rather than the stated three-quarters of an hour.
- Imperial liquid measuresA quart here is the imperial quart, 40 fl oz, or a little under 5 US cups. The quarter pint of cream is 5 imperial fl oz, about 140 ml, a generous half US cup.
- The hinge: cream off the fireBoiling cream into a hot starchy purée that is then reheated will split it. Take the pan off the heat, stir the scalded cream through, and serve at once as directed.
- Sieve, then and now"Rubbed through a fine sieve reversed" means pressing the purée through the convex back of the sieve with a wooden spoon. A blender or food mill does the bulk of the work now, but a final pass through a fine sieve is what gives this soup its characteristic velvet texture.
- Loaf sugarCut from a hard sugar cone or, by the later nineteenth century, sold as cubes. Half an ounce is about a tablespoon of ordinary granulated sugar.
- SeasoningMace is the outer sheath of nutmeg, warmer and less sweet; a scant quarter teaspoon of ground mace is plenty for this quantity. Cayenne should be a pinch only, there to lift the sweetness rather than register as heat.
- StockThe white version wants a light chicken or veal stock; the brown version a well-reduced beef gravy. Chestnut purée is bland and absorbs a great deal, so a weak stock will produce a dull soup.
- YieldSix to eight as a first course, as stated. It is rich, and small cups suit it better than full bowls.
Chestnut soups run through nineteenth-century English cookery books as an autumn and Christmas dish, arriving alongside chestnut stuffing and the roasted nuts sold on winter streets. The sweet chestnut is not native to Britain and was long imported from Spain, Portugal and Italy, which is generally taken to be how the name "Spanish chestnut" attached itself to the species in English usage and helped separate it from the toxic horse chestnut. In southern Europe the nut was a staple of hill country, dried and ground into flour where wheat would not grow; in a book like Cassell's it appears instead as a luxury pur/ée, sieved smooth and enriched with cream, exactly the kind of refined potage a late-Victorian household would serve as the opening course of a dinner in courses. The offer of a white or a brown version, and the anxiety about whether the natural sweetness will be "objected to", reflects a period taste that wanted its savoury courses firmly savoury.