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Chestnut Sauce
1/4 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon paprika 1 cup mashed chestnuts Melt butter; add flour and seasonings. When smooth, add stock; boil five minutes; add chestnuts; reheat and serve.
A short velouté enriched with chestnut purée, printed here with part of its ingredient list missing. Read the quantities before you start.
- The list is incompleteOnly the salt, paprika and chestnuts are given amounts; the butter, flour and stock are named in the method but never measured. A conventional sauce base of about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and a cup or so of stock will suit a cup of purée, but the original text does not say so.
- Mashed chestnutsPeeled chestnuts simmered in stock or milk until soft, then pressed through a sieve or ricer. A cup of purée takes roughly 3/4 lb chestnuts in the shell. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts or unsweetened canned purée both work; avoid the sweetened crème de marrons sold for desserts.
- StockTurkey, chicken or veal stock, unsalted or lightly salted, since the sauce reduces. Chestnuts are bland and starchy, so the stock carries most of the flavour.
- Boil five minutesThat is for the flour, not the chestnuts. Cooking the roux and stock together for five minutes removes the raw-flour taste; once the purée goes in, bring it back to heat only, as prolonged boiling makes it pasty and it scorches easily on the bottom.
- ConsistencyChestnut purée thickens as it stands and again as it cools. Expect to thin the finished sauce with additional stock or a little cream just before serving.
- PaprikaAt this date paprika meant a sweet, mild ground pepper, Hungarian or Spanish, used as much for colour as for heat. A teaspoon in a small quantity of sauce is assertive; taste as you add it.
- Yield and servingSince the stock is unmeasured the yield depends on how much you use; a cup of purée thinned to sauce consistency will make roughly 2 cups. It is a sauce for roast turkey, goose, venison or braised game birds, and it also suits Brussels sprouts.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer — one of the many corporate cookbooks of the period that surrounded a promotional core of chocolate recipes with a full general household manual. A chestnut sauce belongs to the French-influenced American sauce repertoire of that moment: a plain velouté given body and sweetness by a purée, in the same family as the chestnut stuffings and chestnut purées that appeared on New England holiday tables. Chestnuts were then still cheap and abundant in the northeastern United States; the blight that destroyed the American chestnut was first identified in New York in 1904 and had swept most of the native range within a few decades, so recipes like this one were written just before the ingredient became an import.