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Stuffing of Chestnuts and Sauce for Sucking Pig
Peel, scald, and blanch half a hundred chestnuts, and boil them in a pint of milk, with a pinch of salt and half an ounce of butter. When they are done enough, drain and dry them, and mix them with 1 pound of good pork sausage meat. Fill the body of the pig, and sew it securely. When the pig is filled with this force-meat, a sauce, made as follows, should be sent to table with it: Peel, scald, and blanch 6 ounces of sound chestnuts, and stew them in 3/4 of a pint of good brown gravy until they are sufficiently tender to be rubbed through a hair sieve. Stir into the pulp half a dozen tablespoonfuls of rich brown sauce, season rather highly with mace and cayenne, and add a little salt, if necessary. Stir the sauce over the fire until it boils, and serve immediately. A glassful of madeira or sherry may be added or not. Time, twenty minutes to boil the chestnuts for the stuffing; one hour and a quarter for the sauce. Sufficient for one pig.
A Victorian two-part preparation: a chestnut-and-sausage forcemeat for a whole suckling pig, and a chestnut sauce to go with it. Both parts stand on their own, and the sauce is worth making for roast pork or goose even if no pig is involved.
- The hinge: stuffing a whole pigSausage meat packed inside a large roast is the slowest part of the beast to heat. Fill the cavity loosely rather than tightly and check the centre of the forcemeat with a probe: it needs 165F/74C, and on a large pig that will lag well behind the shoulder. One safer option is to bake most of the forcemeat separately in a dish and use only a light filling in the carcass.
- "Half a hundred chestnuts"Fifty chestnuts in the shell will weigh roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb / 700-900 g depending on size, giving perhaps 1 to 1 1/4 lb of peeled nuts. Vacuum-packed or jarred whole cooked chestnuts are the practical substitute: about 1 lb for the stuffing, 6 oz for the sauce, and they can go straight into the milk or gravy.
- Peel, scald and blanchThis means two operations: slitting and removing the hard outer shell, then loosening and rubbing off the bitter inner skin (the pellicle) after a scald in boiling water. Any pellicle left on will taste tannic in the finished sauce.
- Brown gravy and rich brown sauceTwo different things in period usage. The gravy is meat stock, reduced and well flavoured; the "rich brown sauce" is espagnole or a similar roux-thickened brown sauce. A good demi-glace, thinned to pouring consistency, serves for both.
- Hair sieveA sieve of woven horsehair, the standard tool for pushing purees before fine metal mesh was common, and preferred for delicate or acidic mixtures that metal could discolour. A fine-mesh nylon or stainless sieve does the same job; a blender or food processor then a sieve is faster and gives a smoother pulp.
- Seasoning"Rather highly with mace and cayenne" is not a caution to ignore, but start with about 1/4 teaspoon ground mace and a pinch of cayenne to 3/4 pint of sauce and taste up. Mace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed and is milder and more floral than nutmeg; the two are not interchangeable measure for measure.
- The timingsTwenty minutes' simmering suits fresh chestnuts in milk; pre-cooked jarred nuts need eight to ten. The hour and a quarter given for the sauce covers stewing the chestnuts down until they will pass through a sieve, not the finishing, which takes only the few minutes needed to bring it to a boil.
- The wine"A glassful" of madeira or sherry in this period generally means a wineglassful, about 2 fl oz. Add it before the final boil so the raw alcohol cooks off; a dry oloroso or sercial suits the sauce better than a sweet style.
- YieldThree-quarters of a pint of gravy plus six tablespoonfuls of brown sauce and the chestnut pulp, less what the long stewing reduces away, comes to something around a pint of finished sauce.