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Chestnuts Fricassed
1 dozen chestnuts 1/2 pint savory white sauce 1/2 pint milk and water Make a sauce according to recipe given for white sauce. Bake the chestnuts in a hot oven for ten minutes, or less if they are young. The peel and inner skin can then be easily removed. Drop them into milk and water--equal parts of each--and stew them gently with a little salt for half an hour, keeping the saucepan covered. Now drain; and put them on a dish, pouring the sauce over them. It will be best to try the chestnuts when they have been in the oven a little more than five minutes, as they should be removed as soon as the skin will come away easily. More chestnuts should be baked than are really wanted, as there are often bad ones among them.
A simple dish of stewed chestnuts under white sauce, written when chestnuts were a cheap autumn staple. Two details need attention: scoring the nuts before they go in the oven, and knowing when to pull them.
- Score before bakingThe recipe does not say it, but each chestnut needs an X cut through the shell on the flat side before it goes into the oven. Unscored chestnuts build steam inside and burst.
- "A hot oven"In period terms roughly 400-450F. Ten minutes at that heat should be enough to loosen the shell without cooking the nut through, which is all that is wanted here.
- Peel them hotThe instruction to try them at a little more than five minutes is the hinge of the recipe. The papery inner skin comes away far more easily while the nuts are hot; once they cool it clings to the kernel. Work with a towel over the bowl and peel a few at a time, returning the rest to the warm oven.
- Half a pintIf the book is American, half a pint is 1 cup; if British, an imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 cups. Either quantity of sauce will coat a dozen chestnuts.
- Savory white sauceThe cross-referenced sauce is presumably a basic roux-thickened white sauce, on the order of 1 tablespoon each butter and flour to a cup of milk or stock, seasoned. Vegetable stock in place of some of the milk gives it more body.
- The stewing timeHalf an hour of gentle simmering in half milk, half water suits large, starchy chestnuts. Smaller or fresher ones can be tender in 15-20 minutes; test with a knife tip rather than watching the clock, since overcooked chestnuts fall apart into the liquid.
- Bake extra, as instructedThis is sound advice and still is. A proportion of chestnuts in any bag will be shrivelled, mouldy or hollow, and you cannot tell until the shell is off. Buy half again as many as you need.
- YieldA dozen chestnuts is a side dish for two, or a garnish for four. Scale up freely; the sauce quantity is generous.
Chestnuts are the odd nut out: low in oil, high in starch, closer to a potato than to an almond, and filling in a way that vegetarian cookery of the period badly needed. Through the nineteenth century they were cheap and abundant in Europe and, until the blight of the early twentieth century, in the eastern United States as well, where the American chestnut was a common forest tree before it was effectively wiped out. "Fricassee" here seems to be used in its older, looser sense of something stewed gently and served in a white sauce, rather than the chicken dish the word usually calls to mind. The technique -- oven-loosening the shells, then simmering the kernels in milk and water -- is the same one used for chestnut purees and stuffings, and the milk softens the starch.