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Chestnut Puree
1 dozen chestnuts 1/2 pint milk 1 onion size of a walnut 1 ounce butter Pepper and salt Bake the chestnuts in a hot oven for about ten minutes, when the inner skin will come off easily. Put them in a saucepan with the milk and onions. Bring them quickly to boiling point, and then let stew gently for half an hour. Keep the saucepan covered while they are stewing. Now remove them from the milk, leaving the onion, and rub them through a sieve. Work half a teaspoon of corn flour into the butter; then stir three tablespoons of the milk, in which the chestnuts were stewed, into the chestnuts, and add the butter and corn flour and the seasonings. Stir over the fire until the butter is melted, and serve very hot.
A small, rich side dish that behaves more like a savoury vegetable purée than a stuffing. The whole thing hinges on getting the chestnuts fully soft before they meet the sieve.
- Score before bakingCut a cross through the shell of each chestnut before it goes in the oven, or steam will make them burst. The recipe says only "a hot oven" and gives no temperature; at a brisk heat ten minutes is enough to loosen the shell and pellicle — peel them while they are still too hot to be comfortable, since the inner skin grips again as they cool.
- The measurementsA dozen chestnuts is somewhere around 5 to 8 oz in the shell, depending on size, giving perhaps 4 to 6 oz peeled. Half a pint of milk is 1 1/4 cups if the book is using the British imperial pint, 1 cup if American; either works, as most of it is poured off. An onion the size of a walnut is about 1 oz — half a small onion.
- Corn flourBritish usage for cornstarch, not cornmeal and not maize flour. Half a teaspoon kneaded into the ounce of butter is a beurre manié, added to bind and gloss the purée rather than to thicken it noticeably.
- Stewing timeHalf an hour covered at a bare simmer is a minimum, not a maximum. Chestnuts vary; keep going until one crushes to nothing under a spoon, or the sieve stage becomes a fight. Watch the pan, as milk scorches easily at the bottom.
- Sieve or processorA drum sieve or food mill gives the smoothest result and catches any bits of pellicle. A food processor works but leaves a slightly grainier texture, and a blender will turn the purée gluey.
- The onion is discardedIt goes in for flavour only and is left behind in the milk. If you would rather keep it, cook it separately until quite soft and sieve it with the chestnuts.
- FinishingOnly three tablespoons of the cooking milk go back in, so the purée is stiff. Loosen with a little more of the reserved milk if you want a spoonable consistency, and take it off the heat as soon as the butter has melted in — reheating hard will make it stodgy.
- YieldEnough for two as a side, or four as a small garnish alongside a roast vegetable dish. It cools and sets quickly, which is why the original insists on serving it very hot.
Chestnuts earned a place in meat-substitute chapters because they are the odd one out among nuts: low in oil, high in starch, and therefore closer in texture and behaviour to a potato than to an almond. Cooks reaching for meatless dishes in the early twentieth century — whether from vegetarian conviction, Lenten observance, or wartime shortage — leaned on them heavily for exactly that reason, in purées, croquettes, loaves and stuffings. In much of southern Europe the chestnut was famously a bread crop before it was a garnish, ground into flour in mountain districts where grain would not grow. The spelling "corn flour" points to a British source for this particular formula; recipes of this era circulated freely between books with little attribution.