Chestnut Puree
4 cups White Stock II or III 2 cups French chestnuts, boiled and mashed 1 slice onion 1/4 teaspoon celery salt 2 cups scalded milk 1/4 cup butter 1/4 cup flour Salt Pepper Cook stock, chestnuts, onion, and celery salt ten minutes; rub through sieve, add milk, and bind. Season with salt and pepper.
A classic cream-of-chestnut soup, thickened with a butter-and-flour binding rather than eggs or cream. The only genuinely obscure instructions are "bind" and the cross-reference to the book's own stock recipes.
- "Bind" means make a rouxCook the 1/4 cup butter with the 1/4 cup flour for two or three minutes without colouring, then whisk the hot soup into it (or whisk the roux into the soup in small lumps) and simmer a few minutes to lose the raw flour taste. Adding unmixed flour to hot liquid will give you lumps that no sieve will fix.
- White Stock II or IIIThese are the book's own white stock recipes. Any mild chicken stock works; avoid a heavily reduced or dark stock, which will overwhelm the chestnut.
- French chestnutsLarge sweet chestnuts, Castanea sativa, sold in autumn. Two cups mashed is roughly 1 1/4 lb in the shell. Vacuum-packed or jarred cooked chestnuts are an entirely acceptable substitute and skip the worst of the work.
- PeelingIf starting from raw, score each shell, boil five to ten minutes, and peel while hot; both the shell and the papery inner skin must come away, since the inner skin stays bitter and fibrous no matter how long you cook it.
- Scalded milkScalding was routine practice with untreated milk, and is often explained as insurance against its souring in the pot. With pasteurised milk you need only warm it, so it does not shock the soup or slow the thickening.
- Sieve or blenderRubbing through a sieve was the usual route to smoothness. A blender or immersion blender does it in seconds, though passing the result through a fine strainer afterwards still catches stray bits of skin.
- ConsistencyChestnut starch continues to thicken as the soup stands and again on reheating. Hold back some of the milk or stock and thin to taste at the end.
- YieldThe liquids alone come to six cups before the purée is counted, so expect nearer seven or eight cups. It is rich; small cups suit it better than bowls.