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Chestnut Stuffing
3 cups French chestnuts 1/2 cup butter 1 teaspoon salt 1/3 teaspoon pepper 1/4 cup cream 1 cup cracker crumbs Shell and blanch chestnuts. Cook in boiling salted water until soft. Drain and mash, using a potato ricer. Add one-half the butter, salt, pepper, and cream. Melt remaining butter, mix with cracker crumbs, then combine mixtures.
A plain, rich chestnut forcemeat of the sort meant to be packed into a turkey or capon. Nothing here is difficult, but the peeling is the whole job.
- The hinge is the inner skinShelling is easy; the bitter brown pellicle clinging to the nut is not. Score an X through the shell of each nut, boil or roast them a few minutes, and rub the skins off while the chestnuts are still hot. Any that cool will have to be reheated to release.
- "French chestnuts"These are the large European sweet chestnuts (Castanea sativa), sold today as marrons. Vacuum-packed or jarred peeled cooked chestnuts are a legitimate shortcut, though the recipe's 3 cups appears to be measured before shelling, so about 1 lb of peeled nuts is an approximation rather than an exact stand-in.
- Cooking the nutsBoil the peeled chestnuts in salted water 20-30 minutes, until a knife goes through with no resistance. Underdone chestnuts will not rice smoothly and leave gritty flecks through the stuffing.
- Cracker crumbsThe crackers intended are plain unsalted soda or common crackers. If you use saltines, cut the teaspoon of salt back to about half and season at the end by taste.
- The odd pepper measureA third of a teaspoon is an awkward amount; a generous quarter teaspoon of pepper is near enough, and nothing is lost by rounding.
- TextureA ricer gives a light, dry mash; a food processor turns chestnuts into paste. Fold the buttered crumbs in at the last moment and stop mixing as soon as they are distributed, or the stuffing packs into a solid block.
- Yield and cookingThis makes roughly 4 cups, enough for a 6-8 lb bird, or it can be baked in a buttered dish at 350F for 30-35 minutes until set and browned on top. Stuffing cooked inside a bird must reach 165F at its center; check with a thermometer rather than by the bird's timing alone.
- Loosening itChestnut stuffing stiffens as it cools and can be dense. A few spoonfuls of extra cream or a little poultry stock brings it back to a spoonable consistency without diluting the flavor.
Chestnut stuffing for turkey and capon was standard holiday cookery in English and American kitchens through the nineteenth century. The call for French chestnuts is telling: imported European marrons were prized for their size and single, easily-ricered kernel, while American chestnuts were smaller and sweeter. Within a generation of books like this one the point became largely moot in the United States, as chestnut blight, first identified in New York in the early 1900s, effectively removed the native tree from the food supply, leaving imported nuts the ones generally available in shops. The buttered cracker crumbs read as an American touch, where a British cook of the same date would more often have used breadcrumbs and sausage meat.