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Chestnut Pie No. 1
1 pound of chestnuts 2 ounces butter 3 ounces macaroni 2 tablespoons sauce 1 tablespoon rusk crumbs 1 tablespoon flour Throw the chestnuts into boiling water for half an hour; take them out a few at a time, and skin them; pass them through a nut mill or sieve. Cook the macaroni in one pint of milk, drain, and cut up into small pieces. Make a sauce of the milk it was boiled in with the flour and butter. Grease a pie dish, and put a layer of macaroni at the bottom, then a layer of the sauce, then put the chestnuts. Add the rest of the sauce, and put a thin layer of macaroni and rusk crumbs on the top. Put in the oven for half an hour to brown.
A vegetarian pie built on chestnut purée and macaroni in a milk sauce. The method is sound; the quantities are where it needs attention.
- ChestnutsOne pound is weight in the shell, yielding roughly 10-12 oz of peeled nut. Score each shell before the half-hour boil and peel while still hot — the inner brown skin welds itself on as they cool. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts, about 12 oz, replace the whole operation.
- Nut millA small hand mill for grating nuts to a dry meal. A food mill, the fine plate of a mouli grater, or short pulses in a processor all work; stop before it becomes a paste.
- The two tablespoons of sauceGenuinely ambiguous. It may mean a bottled savoury sauce — mushroom ketchup or a vegetarian Worcestershire-style sauce — rather than the milk sauce made later in the recipe, but the text does not say, and it does not tell you where the two spoonfuls go. Taste and judge.
- ThickeningOne tablespoon of flour to a pint of milk gives a pouring sauce, not a binding one. For a pie that slices rather than floods the plate, use closer to 2 oz flour with the 2 oz butter.
- Rusk crumbsRusk is twice-baked bread, dried hard. Dry breadcrumbs or panko give the same effect; fresh crumbs will go soggy under the sauce.
- Cutting the macaroniMacaroni of this period was often sold in long tubes, which is why the recipe says to cut it up. Modern short elbows need no cutting. Cook it a minute short of done, since it gets another half hour in the oven.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A moderately hot oven, 375-400F, for the stated half hour browns the top without drying the interior.
- YieldPerhaps three or four as a main course with a green vegetable, rather more as a side. It is rich and wants something sharp alongside — pickled beetroot or a vinegared salad.
Chestnuts were one of the vegetarian answers to the roast joint long before commercial meat substitutes existed: dense, fatty by the standards of most vegetables, and savoury enough to carry gravy. Books of this kind appeared as vegetarianism gained a foothold in Britain and America around the turn of the twentieth century, and lean hard on nuts, pulses and cheese to supply what the missing meat had. The numbering — Chestnut Pie No. 1 — suggests the author had more than one. Chestnuts were also cheap and seasonal in a way they no longer are, gathered or bought by the pound in autumn.