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Chestnut Souffle
1/4 cup sugar 2 tablespoons flour 1 cup chestnut puree 1/2 cup milk Whites 3 eggs Mix sugar and flour, add chestnuts and milk gradually; cook five minutes, stirring constantly; beat whites of eggs until stiff, and cut and fold into mixture. Bake same as Fruit Souffle; serve with Cream Sauce.
A simple flour-thickened base lightened with egg whites. The instructions lean on two other entries in the book — Fruit Souffle for the baking and Cream Sauce for serving — so plan for both before you start.
- The hinge: cook the base, then cool itThe sugar-flour-chestnut-milk mixture gets the full five minutes of constant stirring called for, which cooks out the raw flour and thickens it. The original says nothing about cooling, but letting the base drop to barely warm before folding in the whites will keep them from deflating on contact.
- Baking, since the original defersThe original sends you to Fruit Souffle for the baking, so check that entry for the dish and the timing. Period directions of this sort call for a buttered dish and a moderate oven, which in modern terms is around 350F; expect somewhere in the region of half an hour, baking until well risen and just set at the centre. Some baked puddings of this class were set in a pan of hot water for a moister crumb, but this recipe does not say to.
- Chestnut pureeUse unsweetened chestnut puree, not the sweetened creme de marrons sold in tubes, which would make the dish cloying. A cup is about 8 oz. Canned or vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts mashed smooth with a little of the milk works well.
- Three whites is the whole leaveningThere is no baking powder here. Beat the whites to firm but not dry peaks — dry, grainy whites will not fold in cleanly and the souffle rises unevenly.
- Cut and fold"Cut and fold" is the period phrase for the folding motion: lighten the base with a spoonful of white first, then fold in the rest in two additions with a spatula.
- Cream SauceLook up the Cream Sauce in the pudding-sauce section rather than the savoury white sauce of the same name; the sweet version is a milk or cream sauce, usually flavoured with vanilla. Check the book's own entry for how it is made and whether it is served warm.
- Yield and timingThe quantities suggest about four servings, and a dish of roughly a quart should hold it, though the original specifies neither. Souffles of this kind sink as they cool, so aim to bring it straight from the oven to the table.
Chestnut puree was a standard sweet-course ingredient in American and English cookery of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when chestnuts were cheap, abundant and roasted on street corners each autumn — the American chestnut had not yet been destroyed by the blight identified in the first decade of the 1900s, and the nuts sold by the peck. Cookbooks of the period treat souffles as a class of hot pudding rather than a French set piece, with one master method and a run of interchangeable flavourings: fruit, chocolate, coffee, chestnut. That is why this entry is so short, and why it points back to the Fruit Souffle for its baking directions. Chestnut puree suited the format well, being starchy enough to need little thickening and mild enough to carry a vanilla cream sauce.