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Cream of Chestnuts
1-1/2 pints of French or Italian Chestnuts; 1 pint rich cream; 1 pint chicken, or any good white stock; 1 tablespoonful butter; 1 teaspoonful salt; 1/2 saltspoonful white pepper.
Pour boiling water over the chestnuts, and let them stand a few minutes to blanch; remove the brown skins. Put 1 pint of nuts in a covered saucepan and put on to boil in water enough to cover them well. Cook until they begin to get soft, about twenty minutes, then add the stock and boil fifteen minutes longer. While these are cooking cut the remaining 1/2 pint of nuts into dice, or quarters. When the nuts have cooked very soft, strain them and return to the saucepan, add the cream and diced nuts, bring to a boil, and simmer gently for five or ten minutes; add the salt, pepper, and butter, and serve very hot in cups with small crackers or thin wafers.
A straightforward chestnut purée soup, with a garnish of diced nuts cooked in the finished cream. The only real work is peeling.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the pepper here is about 1/8 teaspoon. The teaspoonful of salt assumes unsalted stock; taste before adding it if your stock is seasoned.
- Chestnuts by volume1-1/2 pints is a dry measure; the recipe does not make clear whether it is taken before or after shelling, so treat it as roughly a pound or so of peeled nuts, or somewhat under 2 lb in the shell. Vacuum-packed or frozen peeled chestnuts work directly and save the whole peeling stage.
- The peelingBoiling water alone will not always loosen the inner brown pellicle. Score an X through the shell of each nut and either boil five minutes or roast at 425F for fifteen, then peel while still hot. Pellicle left behind can leave the purée gritty and a little astringent.
- "French or Italian"These are the large sweet European chestnuts, sold as marrons or marroni, and they are what is generally offered for sale today; the small native American chestnut of the period was driven out of commerce over the following decades by the blight.
- "Strain them"This means press the softened nuts and their liquid through a sieve or food mill to make the purée, not drain the liquid off. A blender or immersion blender does it faster and smoother. Keep the cooking stock with them.
- After the cream goes inBring it just to the boil and hold it at a bare simmer, as directed. A hard boil can curdle the cream and will overcook the diced nuts into mush.
- ConsistencyChestnut purée thickens noticeably as it stands and again on reheating. Thin with extra stock rather than cream if it goes past the texture you want.
- YieldAround 1-1/2 quarts, serving six as a first course. Served in cups, as directed, it stretches further.
Chestnut soup is old across southern Europe, where the nut was a staple starch in mountain districts long before it was a delicacy, but the version here belongs squarely to the American cream-soup vogue of the 1890s and 1900s. Compilations of this sort devoted whole sections to soups built on the same formula: a vegetable or nut cooked soft in white stock, sieved, and finished with a large quantity of cream, then served in cups with wafers rather than in plates with a spoon. The specification of French or Italian chestnuts is worth noting. Native American chestnuts were still being gathered and sold in this period, but they are small and fiddly, and the imported European nut was the larger, sweeter, more easily peeled article for kitchen work; within a few decades the blight had settled the question by removing the American tree from the market altogether.