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Chestnut Mixture
Boil one quart French chestnuts; remove shells, press through potato ricer; add sugar, salt, cream and flavoring. Fill individual molds with this mixture. Chill. Remove from molds and serve around the chocolate cream mixture.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in early twentieth-century books: the proportions are left to the cook, and it depends on another recipe (the chocolate cream) printed elsewhere in the book. This is the classic Mont Blanc idea, sweetened chestnut purée served against chocolate.
- What a quart means hereChestnuts were sold by dry measure in the shell. A dry quart is roughly 1 1/4 lb of chestnuts unshelled, which after shelling and ricing gives something in the region of 2 cups of purée; the exact yield varies with the size and freshness of the nuts.
- "French chestnuts"The large cultivated European chestnuts sold as marrons, prized because one nut fills the shell and peels cleanly. Any large fresh chestnut works; vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts (about 12 oz) skip the boiling and peeling entirely.
- Score before boilingCut an X through the shell of each nut before it goes into the water, and peel while still hot. The inner pellicle, the bitter brown skin, clings hard once the nut cools and is the difference between a smooth purée and a gritty one.
- Quantities the recipe omitsFor 2 cups of riced chestnut, figure roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and cream added a spoonful at a time until the mixture just holds together. Too much cream and it will not unmould.
- FlavoringIn a 1907 dessert this means vanilla, or more likely for chestnuts a tablespoon of rum, maraschino or sherry. Chestnut purée is bland and wants both the salt and the alcohol or extract to register.
- Ricing, not mashingThe potato ricer is doing real work. It produces the fine strands that give this dessert its texture; a food processor turns chestnut into paste. If you have no ricer, push the hot nuts through a coarse sieve.
- The chocolate creamThe companion recipe was printed elsewhere in the book; presumably some form of moulded chocolate cream. Any set chocolate custard or pot de creme unmoulded onto a platter will serve, with the chestnut moulds turned out around it.
- Chilling and unmouldingTwo hours in the refrigerator, minimum. Lightly oil the individual moulds or line them with plastic; a chestnut mixture bound only with cream has no gelatine and will not release cleanly from a dry mould.
- YieldAbout six small moulds of 1/3 cup each, which is the right scale for something served as an accompaniment rather than a dessert on its own.
Lowney's Cook Book was written by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, which explains why a chestnut dessert here exists chiefly as a frame for a chocolate cream. Sweetened chestnut puree paired with cream is the basis of the dessert generally known as Mont Blanc, long established in French and northern Italian cooking and named after the mountain, for the way the riced puree heaps up like a snow-covered peak. The large, easily peeled nuts called for here were the European cultivated marrons, sold by the quart in city markets each autumn alongside nuts from native trees. The chestnut blight that would destroy the American tree was identified in New York around 1904, and within a generation nearly all the chestnuts in an American recipe would be imported by necessity rather than preference.