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Cream of Chestnut Soup
2 cups mashed chestnuts 4 tablespoons butter 4 tablespoons flour 6 cups milk 1 1/2 teaspoons salt Prepare the chestnuts by immersing in boiling water, and cooking for ten minutes. Remove them from the hot water a few at a time, and with a sharp paring knife quickly remove both skins. Mash them through a colander. Make of the remaining ingredients a white sauce. Add the mashed chestnuts. Reheat, and serve.
A plain white-sauce soup that lives or dies on the chestnuts. The original assumes you know how to get them out of their two skins, which is the only real work here.
- Buy by weightTwo cups of mashed chestnuts takes roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb of chestnuts in the shell. Vacuum-packed or jarred cooked chestnuts work and skip the peeling entirely: about 1 lb, warmed and pressed through a sieve.
- Score before boilingCut an X through the shell on the flat side of each nut before it goes into the water. The recipe omits this; scoring makes the shell and skin far easier to pull away and keeps the nuts from bursting.
- Peel them hotThe instruction to take them out "a few at a time" is the hinge of the whole method. The brown inner skin, the pellicle, comes away only while the nut is hot; once cool it welds itself to the flesh and you will lose half the nut digging it off.
- The colanderA colander in this period meant a perforated metal basin used as a sieve. A food mill or a medium-mesh strainer gives the same result. A blender or food processor makes a smoother, gluier purée that some will prefer and some will find pasty.
- Sauce proportionsFour tablespoons each of butter and flour to six cups of milk is a thin white sauce by design, since the chestnut purée does most of the thickening. Cook the roux a minute or two before adding milk so the soup does not taste of raw flour, and add the milk gradually off the boil.
- SeasoningA teaspoon and a half of salt for six cups of milk is modest; taste and adjust at the end. White pepper, a scrape of nutmeg, or a spoonful of dry sherry are common additions to chestnut soups and worth considering.
- Reheating"Reheat" means bring it back to steaming, not to a boil. Milk-based purée soups scorch on the bottom of the pan quickly; use a heavy pot and stir.
- YieldAbout eight cups, serving six as a first course or four as a main with bread.
Chestnut soup belongs to the long European tradition of treating the chestnut as a starch rather than a nut, the way the mountain districts of Italy, France and Switzerland did for centuries, grinding it to flour and boiling it to porridge when wheat would not grow. Pureed with milk and a butter roux, chestnuts give body and a faintly sweet, mealy substance that might otherwise have come from a meat stock, which would make the dish a natural choice for a meatless table. Meatless cookbooks proliferated in the English-speaking world for two overlapping reasons, the observance of Lenten and Friday abstinence and the wartime food-conservation campaigns of the 1910s, which asked households to keep meatless days voluntarily. American chestnuts were still being sold by the bushel in eastern cities in that era; the blight that destroyed the native tree spread through the same decades, and the chestnuts on sale today are almost all European or Asian.