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Consomme Chestnut
Blanch two dozen chestnuts, cook till tender in a pint of stock; drain and salt slightly. After the chicken consomme has been turned into tureen, drop in the chestnuts carefully, as they are easily broken.
This is a garnish instruction rather than a full soup: it assumes you already have clear chicken consomm nuts are cooked separately so their starch never clouds the broth.
- The point of the separate potChestnuts shed starch as they cook, which would likely cloud a clarified consomme, and this is the usual explanation for simmering them apart in a pint of stock and adding them to the filled tureen. The recipe itself gives no reason, but it is clear that they are not to be cooked in the soup.
- "Blanch" means peel hereIn this period blanching chestnuts meant loosening both the outer shell and the bitter inner skin. Score an X in the flat side, boil two or three minutes, and peel while hot ly. Vacuum-packed or jarred peeled chestnuts work and skip the step entirely.
- Two dozen chestnutsRoughly 12 oz in the shell, depending on size, and somewhat less once peeled. The recipe gives no yield, so how far two dozen go depends on the number the tureen serves.
- Cooking timeFifteen to twenty minutes at a bare simmer for fresh peeled chestnuts, until a skewer meets no resistance. Jarred chestnuts need only five minutes to heat through. Push past tender and they collapse into the crumbs the recipe is warning you about.
- The pint of cooking stockIt is not discarded lightly taken on nut flavour and body. Strain it and keep it for the next batch of soup or for a braise.
- Salting"Salt slightly" keeps the chestnuts mild against the seasoned consomme. Note that the recipe salts them after draining, not in the cooking stock.
- ServingThe chestnuts go in only once the consomme is in the tureen. Lower them in rather than tipping the pan, since whole chestnuts in clear broth are the whole visual effect.
Clear soups in turn-of-the-century American and Anglo-French service were named for their garnish rather than their base consomm is simply chicken consomm celestine with shredded pancake, all built on the same clarified stock. Chestnuts were a seasonal autumn and winter ingredient sold by the pound in shell, and their sweet, floury texture made them a standard garnish for game and poultry dishes in the same months. The instruction to drop them in after the soup reaches the tureen reflects a kitchen where the clarity of a consomm was the measure of the cook's skill; a cloudy bowl undid hours of work with egg white and slow skimming.