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Chestnut Pie No. 2
1 quart of shelled chestnuts 1/2 pint can mushrooms 1 1/2 pints white sauce Biscuit crust To shell the chestnuts, place them in boiling water, and boil ten minutes. While hot, remove the shell and inner skin with a sharp paring knife. Drain the liquid from the mushrooms, and cut the latter in small pieces. Heat mushrooms in a tablespoon of butter in a double boiler; arrange the chestnuts and mushrooms in layers in a baking dish, and pour over them the white sauce. Roll biscuit dough about one-quarter of an inch thick, and cover the chestnuts. Make several openings in the top of the crust. Bake in a quick oven until nicely browned.
A straightforward chestnut-and-mushroom pie under a biscuit lid. The one thing the original glosses over is that ten minutes of boiling loosens the shells but does not make the nuts tender.
- Cook the chestnuts throughThe ten-minute boil is mainly for peeling. After shelling, simmer the nuts until a knife goes in easily, roughly 20-30 minutes, before they go in the dish; the time under the crust may not be enough to soften them much further.
- Quantity of chestnutsA quart of shelled chestnuts is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of nutmeat, which means starting with something like 1 1/2 to 2 lb in the shell. Vacuum-packed or frozen peeled chestnuts substitute directly and skip the worst of the labour.
- Peeling while hotBoth the shell and the bitter inner pellicle must come off, and both cling once the nut cools. Work in small batches and keep the rest in the hot water.
- The canned mushroomsA half-pint can holds a cup including liquid, so it drains to rather less -- call it two-thirds of a cup of mushrooms. Use 8 oz of fresh mushrooms instead, sliced and sauteed in butter in an ordinary skillet until their liquid has cooked off. The double boiler in the original is presumably there to warm canned mushrooms gently without scorching, and is not needed with fresh.
- White sauceOne and a half pints is 3 cups. For a medium sauce, about 2 tablespoons each butter and flour per cup of milk, and season it firmly with salt, pepper and a little nutmeg or mace; the chestnuts are sweet and bland and the sauce carries what seasoning the dish has.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. A biscuit crust wants that heat to rise. Twenty to twenty-five minutes is usually enough for browning, since the filling goes in already hot.
- VentsCut the openings before baking, not after. Three cups of sauce will steam vigorously and an unvented crust turns soggy from below.
- YieldServes about six; the filling alone comes to some two quarts, so use a dish of three quarts or so.
Meatless Cookery belongs to a broader American tradition of cookbooks arguing that a dinner could be built without a joint at its centre, and chapters like this one had to make that case. Chestnuts were an obvious candidate: starchy rather than oily, filling, and traditionally cheap in the eastern United States, where the American chestnut was still a common forest tree. That was already changing as the book was written -- the chestnut blight was identified in New York in the first years of the century and spread through the native stands over the following decades -- so the chestnuts a modern cook buys are almost certainly Italian, Korean or Chinese in origin. The pie itself is built on a familiar pattern for a savoury vegetable dish: a bland principal ingredient, mushrooms for depth, white sauce to bind, and a biscuit crust in place of pastry.