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Puree of Chestnuts
1 pt. chestnuts 1 pt. milk 1 cup cream 1 tablespoon butter Salt and pepper 1 egg Scald the milk. Shell and blanch chestnuts. Cook till very soft in boiling salted water to cover. Mash them in the water left in the pan, and rub them through a fine strainer into the scalded milk. Add the cream, salt, pepper and butter. Heat, and when ready to serve stir the beaten egg in quickly and serve at once with croutons.--Mrs. D.A. Lincoln.
A classic chestnut veloute, thickened with nothing but the nuts themselves and finished with egg. Two things decide whether it works: how thoroughly the chestnuts are cooked, and how the egg goes in.
- The egg is a liaison, not a thickenerBeat the egg, then temper it by whisking a ladleful of the hot soup into it before stirring the mixture back in off the heat. Added straight to a pan on the burner it scrambles into threads and the soup is ruined.
- A pint of chestnutsA volume measure; the order of the steps suggests the nuts are measured before shelling, though the recipe does not say so outright. A pint in the shell is somewhere in the region of 10-12 oz of nuts, yielding rather less than that in nutmeat. Vacuum-packed or jarred cooked chestnuts can be substituted, skipping the shelling and blanching and needing less simmering.
- Shell and blanchScore an X in the flat side, roast or boil the nuts briefly, then peel while hot — both the outer shell and the bitter inner pellicle must come off. Chestnuts that have cooled are close to impossible to skin cleanly.
- Cook till very softNot a suggestion. Expect 25-40 minutes at a simmer for fresh chestnuts. Anything still firm at the centre will not go through a strainer and leaves the soup gritty.
- Scald the milkHeat to just below a boil, about 180F, until the surface shivers and a rim of bubbles forms. This is a holdover from the days of unpasteurized milk, but it still helps the puree loosen smoothly.
- StrainingA food mill or fine sieve does what the original intends; a blender followed by a sieve is faster and gives a finer result. Chestnut puree is starchy and will thicken as it stands, so hold back some of the cooking water to adjust.
- Serve at onceOnce the egg is in, the soup cannot be reheated or held — it will curdle. Have the croutons fried and the bowls warm before you start the finish.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, or four to six first-course servings.
Mrs. D. A. Lincoln was Mary Johnson Lincoln, first principal of the Boston Cooking School and author of Mrs. Lincoln's Boston Cook Book (1884), the volume Fannie Farmer is generally said to have revised into her own famous book. Her name carried enough authority that food and flour firms sought it for their promotional cookbooks, which is why a recipe of hers can turn up in a miller's publication in a soup containing no flour at all. The dish itself is French in method -- a puree bound with egg and cream, in the manner of a potage -- and chestnuts were an ordinary autumn commodity in American cities at the turn of the century, sold by street vendors and grocers before blight destroyed the native American chestnut across its range over the first half of the 1900s. Recipes like this one read differently now: what was a cheap, abundant nut then is an imported specialty today.