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Macaroni with Chestnuts
Roast a dozen fine chestnuts in their shells, peel and pound them to a paste. Season with a small teaspoonful of salt, and put them with 8 ounces of macaroni, previously boiled and drained, according to the recipe given for boiling macaroni, into a stewpan: add 3 ounces of butter and a large onion, uncut. Shake the whole well together, and stir round in the pan for ten or twelve minutes. If dry, pour in 1 tablespoonful of milk, and mix again until hot, when remove the onion, and dish the macaroni. Brown lightly in the oven, or before the fire, well covered with equal quantities of grated Parmesan and fine bread crumbs. Butter should be run over the top.
A late-Victorian pasta dish that treats chestnut paste as the sauce, held together with butter and perfumed by a whole onion that never gets eaten. The only real technique is keeping it moist enough to bind without turning to porridge.
- Chestnuts, weight and prepA dozen large chestnuts in the shell is on the order of 6-8 oz, yielding perhaps 5-6 oz peeled. Score the flat side before roasting in a hot oven for 20-25 minutes and peel while hot, skin and all, or the inner pellicle will refuse to come away.
- The onion is a seasoning, not an ingredient"A large onion, uncut" is left whole so it perfumes the butter and is lifted out before serving. Peel it and leave it intact; a cut onion will fall apart into the macaroni.
- Butter and macaroni3 ounces of butter is 6 tablespoons. The 8 ounces of macaroni is most likely dry weight, about half a standard box, though the wording could also be read as weighed after boiling. Either way the butter is generous, and the chestnut paste is starchy and dry.
- Expect to add more liquidOne tablespoon of milk will not go far against the cooked pasta and chestnut paste. Add it a spoonful at a time until the mixture is creamy and moves in the pan; more than the single spoonful the recipe allows may well be needed.
- Ten or twelve minutes of stirringThis is not further cooking of the pasta but working the paste into a coating. Keep the heat low so the chestnut does not catch and the butter does not brown.
- Boiling the macaroniThe referenced boiling recipe most likely took the tubes well past al dente, as Victorian macaroni recipes generally did. Since the pasta gets ten more minutes in the pan and a spell in the oven, drain it while still firm.
- Browning the top'Before the fire' corresponds to browning under a broiler. In the oven, a hot oven for 10-15 minutes will colour the Parmesan and crumb topping, but the recipe asks only that it brown lightly, so watch it. Dot or drizzle melted butter over it first, as the recipe directs ('Butter should be run over the top'), or the crumbs stay pale and dusty.
- YieldEnough for four as a side dish or three as a light main course.
Chestnuts were a starch crop long before they were a garnish, ground into flour and boiled into porridge across Tuscany, Corsica and the Cevennes, and a paste of roasted chestnuts dressing pasta sits in that older, frugal tradition. English and American compilations of the nineteenth century often treated macaroni as a starchy accompaniment to meat rather than as a course in its own right, the Italian habit of serving pasta first not yet having taken hold outside Italian households. The whole onion dropped into the pan and removed before serving is a characteristic Victorian device for flavour without texture, familiar from sauces and stewed dishes of the period.