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Chestnut Soup No. 1
1 quart of milk 1 pound of chestnuts 2 bay leaves 1 gill cream Pepper and salt Put the chestnuts into boiling water, and let them boil for 45 minutes; remove the shells and skins, and press through a sieve. Stir them into the boiling milk in a double saucepan, with pepper, salt and bay leaves; add the cream, and serve with croutons.
A plain purée soup that depends entirely on the chestnuts being cooked soft enough to sieve. Everything else is assembly.
- A gillA quarter of a pint: about 5 fl oz in British measure, 4 fl oz in American, so roughly half a cup either way. The cream is enrichment rather than structure, so a little more or less does no harm.
- ChestnutsOne pound in the shell yields roughly 12 oz of peeled nut. Score each shell with an X before boiling or they are miserable to peel; work while they are hot, since the inner brown skin clings once cool. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts, about 12 oz, can stand in and need only simmering until soft.
- Boiling timeForty-five minutes is generous for boiling in the shell but not unreasonable for large nuts. Test one at 30 minutes; it should crush without resistance.
- SievingThe original wants a smooth purée pressed through a sieve. A food processor or blender with a ladle of the milk gets there faster, though a final pass through a fine sieve is what gives the soup its texture.
- The double saucepanA bain-marie, and the point of it: milk thickened with starchy chestnut purée scorches readily over direct heat. If you use a heavy pan on the stove instead, keep it at a bare simmer and stir.
- Bay leavesThe recipe puts them in with the purée and seasoning; putting them into the milk as it heats gives them longer to infuse, at least 10 minutes. Fish them out before serving.
- Consistency and seasoningA pound of chestnuts to a quart of milk gives a fairly thick soup; thin with more milk or a little vegetable stock. Chestnuts are sweet and take more salt than you expect, and a scrape of nutmeg is period-appropriate.
- YieldFour to six as a first course. The croutons are not optional in spirit — the soup is uniformly soft and wants the contrast.
Chestnut soup belongs to a European tradition in which the chestnut was a staple starch rather than a luxury: in upland Italy, Corsica, the Cévennes and parts of Iberia, chestnut flour and boiled chestnuts stood in for grain on ground too poor or steep for wheat. By the time this recipe was written the nut had migrated in British and American cookbooks to the status of a seasonal delicacy, associated with autumn and with the stuffing of a roast bird. The chestnut — starchy, filling, faintly sweet, rich in a way vegetables generally are not — could do work in a soup that few other things in the larder could. The milk-and-cream base here resembles what is often described as the white soup formula, with the chestnut purée taking the place of the veal or almond that would otherwise have thickened it.