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Chestnut Patties
1 1/2 pounds of chestnuts 2 tablespoons of cream 2 teaspoons of mixed herbs 8 or 10 pate cases 1/4 pint of milk Throw the chestnuts into boiling water for half an hour, remove both outer and inner skins, and pass through a fine sieve, then add the cream, milk, herbs and pepper, and mix well together; if too stiff, a little more milk and cream can be added. Fill the cases and put them in the oven for fifteen minutes. Serve, garnished with parsley.
A simple chestnut purée baked in pre-made pastry shells. The recipe assumes a cook who knows what a pâté case is and how hot to run the oven, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- Peel while hotThis is the hinge. The inner skin (the pellicle) only comes away cleanly while the nuts are steaming hot, so score each one, boil in batches, and peel a few at a time, leaving the rest in the water. Cooled chestnuts have to be re-heated or the skin welds itself to the flesh.
- Pâté casesPâté cases — Small blind-baked short-pastry or puff shells, either made in advance by the cook or bought from a baker. Modern equivalents are tartlet shells or vol-au-vent cases, roughly 2 to 3 inches across. The filling is already cooked, so the fifteen minutes in the oven is to heat through and colour, not to cook pastry from raw.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all. As a modern equivalent, 350-375F for the stated fifteen minutes will heat the filling and crisp the shells without darkening pastry that has already been baked once.
- A quarter pintDepending on whether the measure is imperial or US, that is 5 or 4 fl oz, i.e. somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3 cup US. Add it gradually rather than all at once; chestnut purée varies enormously in how much liquid it will take.
- Weight of chestnutsThe pound and a half is presumably in-shell weight, which yields something like 1 1/4 lb of peeled nut. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts take you straight to the sieving stage and are a fair substitute.
- SievingA drum sieve was the usual route to a smooth purée when this was written. A food processor does it faster but can turn chestnut gluey if overworked, so pulse rather than run it, or use a potato ricer.
- Mixed herbsDried mixtures of the period typically ran to some combination of thyme, marjoram, sage and parsley. Two teaspoons of dried herb in this quantity of purée is assertive; taste as you go.
- SaltThe recipe seasons with pepper only. Chestnut is sweet and starchy and needs salt to read as savoury at all, so season the purée properly before it goes into the cases.
- YieldEight to ten small cases, which is a light lunch for four with a salad, or a first course for eight.
Meatless Cookery belongs to the wave of books published around the First World War, when meat was scarce, expensive and in places rationed, and cooks needed dishes that ate like a main course without one. Chestnuts were an obvious candidate: cheap, filling, high in starch rather than oil, and with a mealy texture that takes savoury herbs and stock the way potato does. Southern Europe had long treated chestnuts as a staple grain substitute — ground into flour for polenta and bread in Corsica, Tuscany and the Limousin — but in Britain and America they had been mostly a stuffing ingredient and a Christmas roast-cart item. Books of this period tended to promote them out of the garnish role and into the "meat substitutes" chapter, alongside lentils, nuts and cheese. The pâté case is the giveaway that this is a genteel table rather than an austerity one: a ready-made pastry shell, cream in the filling, and parsley on top.