Home › Meat Substitutes › Chestnuts with Bread Sauce
Chestnuts with Bread Sauce
1 dozen chestnuts 1/2 pint bread sauce 1/2 pint milk and water Make the sauce according to recipe given for bread sauce.
The instructions here are barely a sketch: the milk and water are for cooking the chestnuts, the bread sauce is made separately and the two are combined at the end. A few notes fill in what the original assumes you already know.
- Half a pintIf the book is American, half a pint is one cup; in British measure it is 10 fl oz. The difference is small, though the smaller quantity may only just cover a dozen chestnuts, and it affects how saucy the finished dish is.
- Peeling is the whole jobScore each nut on the flat side, boil or roast 5 minutes, then peel while hot, taking off both the shell and the bitter inner skin. Chestnuts that cool become nearly impossible to skin, so work in small batches and keep the rest in the hot water.
- Cooking the chestnutsSimmer the peeled nuts in the milk and water, barely bubbling, 25 to 40 minutes depending on size, until a knife goes through without resistance. A hard boil breaks them down, so gentle heat is safest if the nuts are to stay whole.
- Bread sauce, for referenceBread sauce of this period is typically milk infused with onion and a clove or two, thickened with fresh white breadcrumbs and finished with butter, seasoned with salt, pepper and often a little mace or nutmeg. The book's own recipe, referred to but not reproduced here, will set the exact proportions.
- Do not use dried crumbsBread sauce made with packaged dry crumbs turns to paste. Soft crumbs from a day-old white loaf, crusts removed, swell into the milk and keep the sauce loose.
- Assembly and yieldDrain the chestnuts and fold them into the hot sauce; a spoonful of the cooking milk loosens it if needed. A dozen chestnuts is roughly 4 oz peeled, enough for two as a side dish.
- SubstitutingVacuum-packed cooked chestnuts work and skip the peeling entirely. They are already tender, so warm them in the milk and water for 5 minutes rather than simmering them for half an hour.
Chestnuts behave like no other nut: low in oil, high in starch, and closer to a potato or a bean than to an almond, which suited them to vegetarian roasts, croquettes and stuffings. Bread sauce is the English accompaniment to roast fowl and game, thickened with crumbs rather than flour, and often traced back to medieval bread-based sauces, though bread sauce under that name is documented from the eighteenth century. Cookbooks of this kind often worked by analogy, borrowing a familiar sauce to make an unfamiliar centrepiece feel settled on the plate.