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Purée de Marrons
Ingredients.
Twenty-five large Chestnuts.
Three ounces of Butter.
One teaspoonful of Castor Sugar.
One pint and a half of White Stock.
Half a pint of Cream.
The book gives quantities only, in the shorthand style of late Victorian cookery-school notes, and assumes the cook knows the standard purée method. Here is what the list implies and what needs translating.
- The hinge: sieve, then finish off the heatA purée soup of this era is passed through a fine sieve or tammy after the chestnuts are tender, then returned to the pan and the cream stirred in at the last moment. Once the cream is in, keep it below a simmer — boiling it will thin the texture the sieving was meant to build.
- Imperial measuresA pint here is the imperial 20 fl oz, so a pint and a half of stock is about 850 ml (roughly 3½ US cups) and half a pint of cream about 285 ml (1¼ US cups). Using US pints will give a noticeably thicker soup.
- Twenty-five large chestnutsThat is roughly 1 lb / 450 g in the shell, yielding around 12 oz / 340 g peeled. Vacuum-packed or tinned whole chestnuts are an honest substitute at about 12 oz; they are already cooked, so they need only to soften in the stock.
- Peeling fresh chestnutsScore each shell, then either roast at 425F for 15 minutes or boil for 5, and peel while hot. The inner brown pellicle is bitter and must come away with the shell, or the soup will taste harsh.
- Castor sugarSuperfine sugar. The single teaspoon is seasoning, not sweetening — it lifts the chestnut flavour, much as a pinch of sugar does in a tomato sauce.
- White stockA pale unsalted veal or chicken stock, made without browning the bones. A good low-sodium chicken stock stands in; avoid anything dark or heavily seasoned, which will overwhelm the chestnut.
- The butterThree ounces (85 g). The list gives no method: in purée soups of this period the butter is either used to stew the peeled chestnuts gently before the stock goes in, or worked in at the finish with the cream. Either way, do not let it brown.
- Yield and serviceAbout six portions as a first course, judging by the quantity of liquid. Croûtons fried in butter are a usual garnish for purée soups, as are a few whole chestnuts broken into pieces; season with salt and white pepper at the end, after the cream.
Chestnuts were a staple starch long before they were a luxury — across the Cévennes, the Limousin and northern Italy the tree was called the bread tree, and dried chestnuts were milled into flour when grain was scarce. By the time this book was written, marrons had moved up the menu: the large cultivated chestnut that fills its burr with a single unsplit kernel was the one worth peeling, and it appears in high-class British kitchens as a purée soup, a stuffing for turkey, and glacé for the sweet course. Purée soups thickened by their own vegetable rather than by flour are sometimes said to mark careful cookery in this period, though many purées of the day were in fact bound with rice, breadcrumbs or a flour panade; the half-pint of cream at the finish is best read as a matter of style, a purée so finished often being styled a crème.