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Chestnut Salad
Shell, boil, and blanch until tender, 1 pint of chestnuts. Drain, dust with salt, and stand aside to cool. Provide 2 hard-boiled eggs. When ready to serve arrange the lettuce in a salad bowl, put the chestnuts over, and then a French dressing, using lemon juice in place of vinegar. Hold a small sieve over the bowl, and rub the yolks through it, covering the salad lightly.
A simple composed salad that depends entirely on the chestnuts being cooked through and peeled clean. The recipe assumes you know how to get a chestnut out of its two skins, which is the whole job.
- QuantityA pint of chestnuts in the shell is roughly 12-14 oz; shell and inner skin account for something like a fifth of that, so the peeled weight is appreciably less. The recipe gives no yield and no number of servings.
- Shelling and blanchingScore an X in the flat side of each nut, boil until tender, then peel while still hot. 'Blanch' here almost certainly refers to removing the inner brown pellicle, which comes away far more easily while the nut is hot and grows stubborn as it cools. Note that the recipe as written puts shelling before boiling.
- Tender, not mushyChestnuts are starchy rather than fatty and go from firm to crumbling quickly. Test one at 15 minutes; they should give like a cooked potato but still hold a halved shape.
- French dressingIn this period that generally means oil and acid seasoned with salt and pepper, commonly in the region of three parts oil to one of acid; some period versions add mustard, though nothing of the sort is called for here. Lemon juice replaces the vinegar, which suits the sweetness of the nut.
- The sieved yolkOnly the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs go through the sieve; the whites are not used in the recipe as written. Use a fine mesh and tap rather than press hard, so the yolk falls as a loose powder rather than a paste.
- LettuceNo quantity is given. One good head of a crisp, mild lettuce such as Boston or romaine is right for this amount of chestnut.
- Order of assemblyDress and sieve at the table or immediately before serving; the sieved yolk soon takes up the dressing and loses its loose, powdery look.