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Pepper and Salt (Slit the chestnuts at both)
Slit the chestnuts at both ends, put them into boiling water, and boil ten minutes. Then remove the husks. Melt the butter in a saucepan, put in the chestnuts and sauté for a few minutes, but do not brown. Then add the stock and let the soup boil until the chestnuts are tender, when they must be rubbed through a hair-sieve. Warm up the soup, add the sugar, seasoning, and cream, and it is ready to serve.
A Victorian purée of chestnuts, stock and cream, given with no quantities at all — the ingredient list has been lost from the heading, which survives only as "Pepper and Salt." The method is sound; the proportions are yours to set.
- Working proportionsFor a starter for six, reckon on 2 lb chestnuts in the shell (roughly 1½ lb peeled), 2 oz butter, 2 pints good veal or chicken stock, a teaspoon of sugar, and a quarter pint of cream. The original gives none of these, so treat them as a starting point rather than a reconstruction.
- Slit at both endsThis is the hinge. A cut through the shell at each end lets steam escape and, more importantly, lets the boiling water reach the inner brown pellicle so it lifts away with the shell. Chestnuts peeled without slitting fight you, and the skin left behind is bitter and fibrous.
- Peel them hotTen minutes' boiling is enough only if you work fast. Lift a few at a time from the water and skin them while they are almost too hot to hold; once cool the pellicle bonds to the nut again. Return any stubborn ones to the pan for a minute.
- Sauté without colourThe instruction not to brown is deliberate. Chestnut sugars catch quickly in butter and a scorched note carries right through a pale soup. Keep the heat moderate and stop as soon as the nuts smell toasty.
- The hair sieveA hair-sieve was a fine drum sieve strung with horsehair, worked with a wooden mushroom. A food mill on the fine plate, or a blender followed by a pass through a conical strainer, gives the same result. Chestnuts have enough starch and grit in the skin fragments that the straining step is worth keeping even if you use a blender.
- The sugarNot a sweetener so much as a corrective; chestnuts vary a great deal and a small quantity lifts the flavour of a dull batch. Add it at the end, taste, and stop well short of anything you would call sweet.
- Finishing with creamAdd the cream off the boil and reheat gently. A chestnut purée is thick and catches on the base of the pan easily, so stir and use a heavy saucepan. Slacken with more stock if it has gone past the consistency of pouring cream.
- ShortcutVacuum-packed cooked chestnuts work perfectly well here and skip the peeling entirely. Use about 1 lb and go straight to the butter.
Chestnut soup belongs to the run of smooth, sieved purées that filled the first course of a formal English dinner in the late nineteenth century — a class of soup that depended on a good stockpot and a strong wrist, since everything had to go through the hair sieve by hand. Chestnuts were a seasonal luxury rather than a staple in Britain: the sweet chestnut grows here but crops unreliably, and the best nuts for cooking were imported from France and Italy through the autumn, which is why this soup often reads as a Christmas-season dish. The pinch of sugar is a survival of an older habit of seasoning savoury purées with a little sweetness, and the phrase "rubbed through a hair-sieve" carries the flavour of the period, though hair sieves remained in use long enough that the wording cannot date the recipe precisely.