Chestnut Soup
2 cups chestnuts shelled and blanched 3 cups cold water 2 cups scalded milk teaspoon celery salt cayenne nutmeg 2 tablespoons onion 4 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1 cup cream Cook chestnuts in cold water until tender, press through a sieve, and add scalded milk. Cook onion in butter five minutes, add flour, seasonings, and chestnut mixture. Cook five minutes, add cream, strain, and serve. NOTE. - To shell chestnuts, make a cross on either side of the nut with a sharp knife. Put one teaspoon melted butter in dripping pan; add chestnuts and cook in oven until shells come off easily.
A straightforward puree soup that depends almost entirely on getting the chestnuts clean and fully tender before they go through the sieve. Everything after that is a five-minute velouté.
- Shelling and the inner skinThe oven method in the note is sound: score a cross on both sides, toss with a little melted butter, and roast until the shells split. The book gives neither temperature nor time. The part that matters is the papery inner skin (the pellicle) — it is bitter and fibrous, and it comes away most easily while the nuts are still hot; that skinning is what "blanched" refers to here.
- Quantity of chestnutsTwo cups of shelled nuts is roughly 12 oz, which means starting with something over a pound in the shell. Vacuum-packed or jarred cooked chestnuts work directly; a 400 g package is slightly more than called for, and needs only to simmer in the water until it collapses, far less time than raw nuts, for which the recipe gives no time at all beyond "until tender".
- Unstated seasoning amountsThe list gives "teaspoon celery salt" — a fraction may have dropped out of the transcription — and then cayenne and nutmeg with no measures at all; the book assumes a cook who seasons by taste. A pinch of cayenne and a scant grating of nutmeg for the full pot, adjusted after the cream goes in.
- Two tablespoons onionThat is chopped onion by volume, about a quarter of a small onion. Cook it in the butter over low heat so it softens without colouring; browning it will muddy a soup this pale.
- Scalded milkScalding meant heating to just below the boil, originally to stop raw milk souring the soup and to shorten cooking. With pasteurised milk it is no longer necessary for keeping, but warming the milk still keeps the roux from seizing when the chestnut puree is added.
- Sieve, then strain againChestnuts do not blend perfectly smooth; the second straining at the end is not optional if you want the texture the recipe intends. A food mill or blender followed by a fine chinois does the work of the original sieve.
- ConsistencyChestnut starch thickens hard on standing. If the soup tightens between the sieve and the table, loosen it with additional scalded milk rather than water, which flattens the flavour.
- YieldAbout six cups finished, serving four to six as a first course. It is rich enough that a small cup is the right portion.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, which explains the book's heavy chocolate section and its otherwise conventional American range — this chestnut soup is standard turn-of-the-century Boston cooking school fare, a puree bound with butter, flour and cream in the manner Fannie Farmer's students were taught. Chestnut soup was a autumn and holiday dish in that tradition, a way of using nuts that were then cheap and locally abundant: the American chestnut still grew through the eastern forests when this book appeared, and street vendors sold roasted nuts by the paper cone. The blight fungus identified in New York in 1904 killed most of those trees within four decades, and chestnuts sold in the United States today are almost entirely European or Asian, larger than the ones this recipe was written for, which were smaller and generally reckoned the sweeter nut.