Home › Soups › Chestnut Soup No. 2
Chestnut Soup No. 2
1 pound chestnuts 1 quart milk 1/2 ounce butter 6 cloves 3 ounces of onions 1 dozen white peppercorns Bake the chestnuts either on the stove or in a hot oven until the skins are easily removed, which will be in ten minutes or less. Remove the skins, and drop them into a saucepan, in which the milk, with the peppercorn and cloves-tied in a bit of muslin--has already been heated. Place the saucepan on the stove where the milk will keep hot without boiling. Slice the onion very thin, and fry it in the butter until tender; being careful that it does not brown. Add it to the milk, and let it simmer until the chestnuts are tender, which will be in about one-half hour. Remove the muslin containing the cloves and peppercorns, and rub all througha sieve. return to the saucepan, and thicken with a tablespoon of cornflour.
A plain milk-based purée that depends entirely on the chestnuts being peeled while hot and the milk never being allowed to boil. Two spots in the text are garbled: "drop them into" means the peeled nuts, not the skins, and the sieved purée is what returns to the pan.
- Scoring and roastingCut an X through the shell of each nut first, or they will steam inside and refuse to peel; the recipe's ten minutes may be optimistic for large nuts. Peel while they are too hot to hold comfortably, since the inner brown pellicle sets like paper once cool.
- WeightsOne pound of chestnuts in the shell gives roughly 12 ounces of peeled nut. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon; three ounces of onion is one small onion.
- Do not let the milk boilThis is the hinge. A quart of milk held at a bare simmer for half an hour will skin over and scorch on the bottom if the heat is too high. Use the lowest flame or a heat diffuser, stir now and then, and accept that it will reduce slightly.
- White peppercorns and clovesThe muslin bag keeps dark specks out of a pale soup, which is the whole point of white pepper here. A dozen peppercorns and six cloves is assertive for a quart of milk; taste after twenty minutes and pull the bag early if the clove dominates.
- The onionSweat it in butter without colour, as instructed. Any browning will read as caramel against the chestnut.
- SievingRubbing through a sieve was the period's usual route to smoothness. A blender or immersion blender does it in seconds; pass it through a fine sieve afterwards if you want the old texture.
- CornflourBritish cornflour is American cornstarch. Slake the tablespoon in a little cold milk before adding, then cook two or three minutes to lose the raw starch taste. Chestnut purée is already starchy, so the soup may need none at all.
- Yield and seasoningAbout four servings as a first course. No salt is specified anywhere in the original; the soup needs a good deal of it, added at the end so you can judge against the reduced milk.
Chestnut soup belongs to a long European tradition of treating the nut as a starch rather than a garnish — in the chestnut belts of Italy, France, Switzerland and Corsica it was ground for flour and boiled for porridge well into the nineteenth century. Chestnuts offered bulk and starch without a stock pot, and milk supplied the richness that meat broth otherwise would. The pale, clove-scented, sieved white soup sits closer in spirit to the almond and artichoke "white soups" of an earlier manner than to the smoky roasted-chestnut purées served now. The numbered title may suggest the compiler thought the dish common enough to need more than one version.