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Nutmeg, Salt, and Pepper
A saltspoonful of Sugar.
Cut off the tops of the chestnuts and boil them for fifteen minutes; then skin them, put them into a saucepan, and cover them with stock; put a buttered paper over them, and cook them for three-quarters of an hour. Rub them through a wire sieve, with a gill of cream, one egg, and three ounces of butter; season them with a little nutmeg, pepper, salt and sugar; mix well, and use. NEW
This is a chestnut pur inge \ used as a stuffing or a garnish for game; the printed heading has been sheared off, which is why the page opens mid-sentence with the sugar. A few of the quantities need translating and one is missing altogether.
- The missing quantityNo weight of chestnuts is given — the original entry's ingredient list has been cut. A gill of cream, one egg and 3 oz butter will bind roughly 1 lb (450 g) of peeled chestnuts into a firm pur e suitable for stuffing; use more chestnuts if you want it stiffer.
- Gill and saltspoonA British gill is 5 fl oz, a generous half cup. A saltspoonful is about a quarter teaspoon, so the sugar is a seasoning note rather than a sweetener.
- Cutting the topsScore an X through the shell on the flat side of each nut before boiling. Fifteen minutes' boiling loosens both the shell and the bitter inner pellicle, but they only peel cleanly while hot — work through them a few at a time and keep the rest in the water.
- The buttered paperA cartouche: a disc of buttered parchment pressed directly onto the chestnuts under the stock. It keeps them submerged and stops the exposed tops drying, and it matters more than the pan lid does.
- The braiseThree-quarters of an hour at a bare simmer is right for whole chestnuts in stock. They should crush under a spoon with no resistance; anything still firm at the centre will show as grit in the finished pur e.
- SievingA wire sieve and a wooden spoon still give the smoothest result, but a food processor followed by a pass through a fine sieve is faster. Add the butter and cream while the chestnuts are hot so the fat emulsifies rather than streaking.
- The eggThe egg is there to set the pur e when it goes into a bird or a mould and is cooked again. If you intend to serve the pur e on its own, cook it through in the oven or in a bain-marie — do not treat it as finished at the point the recipe stops.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities, so any yield is an estimate: worked up from about 1 lb of peeled chestnuts this would serve roughly six as an accompaniment to venison or grouse, or stuff a bird or two with some left over.
Chestnut purée belongs to the standard game repertoire of late-Victorian and Edwardian professional cookery, where a starchy, faintly sweet garnish was the expected foil to strong dark meat — the same logic that puts bread sauce beside pheasant and redcurrant beside venison. Chestnuts were gathered in autumn, arriving in the kitchen at exactly the moment the game season opened, and cooks were expected to shell and sieve them by hand, which is the tedious labour this recipe assumes without comment. The technique itself — braise in stock under a buttered paper, then pass through a sieve and enrich with butter, cream and egg — is straight French practice as codified in the grande cuisine kitchens whose methods English \"high class\" manuals were written to transmit to households employing a trained cook. The truncated heading is a reminder of how these books were assembled: recipes were set in dense runs, and a page can begin, as this one does, with a saltspoonful of sugar and no clue what it belongs to.