Chestnuts
If the truth were known, many persons would confess that chestnuts never look so tempting as when they are seen at the corner of a street on the rude baking contrivance of a vagabond roaster. If they only had the courage to do so in the face of day, they would gladly stop to buy a pennyworth and consent to pay a shilling. Nobody has been known to feel in the same way to boiled chestnuts, unless it be the Portuguese and those who have learnt their style, which is to top them (that is, nip off their points) and to boil them with anise-seed-half an ounce to fifty chestnuts.
Chicken Purée of Chestnuts. The outer and the inner skins being removed, put fifty chestnuts in a stewpan with a pint of milk, and boil them slowly over the fire till they are quite done. Next drain away the milk and rub them hot through a wire sieve. Put the purée thus obtained into a stewpan with a pat of butter, a little sugar, a wineglassful of cream, pepper and salt. Make it hot without boiling it, and serve it with cutlets, goose, duck, or turkey.
Chestnut Soup.- Make the purée as above, using broth instead of milk. Add to it three or four pints of broth, double broth, or good brown gravy.
Chestnut Forcemeat will be found under Forcemeat.
Chestnut Pudding. The only very good one is the Nesselrode; but that is superb, and is described under its name.
Two workable dishes sit inside this short essay: a chestnut purée to serve with roast birds and cutlets, and the same purée thinned into soup. The peeling is the whole job; everything after it is straightforward.
- Both skins, while hotThe hinge of the recipe is the inner skin (the pellicle), which is bitter and clings in the chestnut's grooves. Score each nut with a cross, roast at 425F or boil for a few minutes, then peel shell and pellicle together while they are still too hot to be comfortable; cooled chestnuts will not give them up.
- Fifty chestnutsThat is roughly 2 lb in the shell, though the peeled weight varies a good deal with the size of the nuts. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts do much the same work and skip the peeling entirely — simmer them in the milk to soften and take up flavour.
- A wineglassfulIn Victorian cookery books this is about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. A "pat of butter" is about an ounce. Neither is critical here; adjust the cream to the thickness you want.
- Do not let it boilOnce the cream and butter are in, hold the purée below a simmer. Boiled cream splits and the purée turns grainy over the starch.
- Passing the puréeA wire sieve and a wooden spoon still give the silkiest result, and hot chestnuts pass far more easily than cool ones. A food mill on the fine plate is a fair substitute; a food processor makes it gluey.
- Double brothStock that has been reduced by half, or a second batch simmered over fresh bones — in effect a concentrated stock. For the soup, expect to sieve again after adding the liquid, and season generously, since chestnut purée is bland on its own.
- The Portuguese boilingHalf an ounce of aniseed to fifty chestnuts is about two tablespoons of seed, added whole to the boiling water and discarded with it. The nuts are eaten from the shell afterwards.
- YieldThe purée serves six to eight as a side dish with goose, duck or turkey. With three to four pints of broth added, the soup serves eight.
- The odd heading"Chicken Purée of Chestnuts" appears to be a printing slip; nothing in the method involves chicken. Read it as chestnut purée, which is what the instructions describe.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877) took its name from Auguste Kettner's Soho restaurant, though the text is generally attributed to the journalist and critic E. S. Dallas, and it reads throughout like a man writing about food rather than a cook writing recipes — hence the paragraph on street roasters before any instruction appears. That preamble is accurate to the period: roast chestnuts were a staple of the London winter street trade, sold by the pennyworth from coke braziers, and a respectable diner's reluctance to be seen buying them is the sort of social detail Dallas enjoyed. The purée itself is standard French practice of the day, the accompaniment that still turns up beside game and roast goose. The Nesselrode pudding he defers to elsewhere in the book is a chestnut-and-cream iced pudding, traditionally credited to the chef of Count Karl Nesselrode, the Russian diplomat, and it was one of the grandest desserts a nineteenth-century kitchen could send out.