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Chestnut Flour Soup
1 quart of milk 4 ounces of prepared chestnut flour 1 small onion 2 tablespoons cream Boil the milk with the onion in a double saucepan for one hour. Mix the chestnut flour to a smooth paste with the cold milk, and add it to the boiling milk; let it simmer for 30 minutes. Remove the onion and add the cream.
A plain milk-and-chestnut velouté that depends almost entirely on the quality of the flour and on gentle heat. Two things in the original need reading closely: the milk is one quart total, and the pan is a double boiler.
- Reserve milk for the pasteThe "cold milk" used to slake the flour comes out of the same quart, not in addition to it. Set aside about half a cup before the rest goes on to infuse, or the soup will be thin.
- Double saucepanThis is a double boiler — a bowl or inset over simmering water. Milk held at a boil for an hour will catch on direct heat, and chestnut flour is starchy enough to stick as well, which is likely why the arrangement is specified.
- Prepared chestnut flour"Prepared" most likely means simply dried, milled and sifted chestnut flour, sold in Italian groceries as farina di castagne. It is naturally sweet and gluten-free; four ounces is roughly a cup, but weigh it, as it packs unevenly.
- Whisk it inAdd the paste to the boiling milk in a thin stream while whisking. Chestnut flour lumps more readily than wheat and the lumps do not disperse with cooking.
- TimingThe hour-long milk infusion is about drawing flavour from the onion rather than cooking it, and a shorter infusion over the water bath will get much of the way there. The 30 minutes after the flour goes in matters more — chestnut flour tastes raw and chalky if hurried.
- SeasoningThe original gives none. Salt is essential here to keep the natural sweetness from reading as dessert; white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg suit it.
- YieldA quart makes four modest bowls or six small cups. It thickens noticeably as it cools, so thin with a little hot milk before serving if it has stood.
Chestnut flour belongs to the mountain economies of Corsica, Tuscany and the Limousin, where sweet chestnuts stood in for grain on ground too steep and poor for wheat; dried over slow fires and stone-milled, the nuts yielded a sweet, dense flour used for polenta, flatbreads and porridges long before it turned up in English soup tureens. The method here, an onion-infused milk thickened with a slaked starch and finished with cream, is straightforward French white-soup technique borrowed wholesale and pointed at an unfamiliar ingredient.