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Creamed Chestnuts
1 quart Italian chestnuts 1 cup white sauce Plunge the chestnuts into boiling water, and boil them for ten minutes. With a sharp paring knife remove both the outer and the inner skin. Prepare one cup of white sauce, and add the cooked chestnuts, also one-half teaspoon salt. Cook a few minutes and serve.
A short recipe that depends almost entirely on one thing going right: getting the skins off. Everything else is a plain béchamel.
- Peel them hotBoth the leathery outer shell and the bitter inner pellicle come away cleanly only while the nut is still steaming. Work with a few at a time and keep the rest in the hot water, or the inner skin welds itself into the creases of the kernel.
- Score before boilingCut a shallow X through the shell on the flat side of each nut before it goes into the water. The recipe does not mention this, but without it the shells cling and some nuts may burst.
- A quart of chestnutsMeasured in the shell, that is roughly 1.5 lb, yielding somewhere around 1.2 lb peeled. Modern chestnuts are usually sold by weight, so buy about a pound and a half.
- Ten minutes is for the skins, not the nutAfter peeling, the kernels are still firm and starchy. They need a further 15 to 20 minutes of simmering in water or milk before they are tender enough to eat; "cook a few minutes" in the sauce will not do it unless they were fully cooked first.
- White saucePeriod proportions for one cup run from 1 tablespoon each butter and flour (thin) to 2 tablespoons each (medium, the usual choice for creamed vegetables), cooked with 1 cup milk until it coats a spoon. Nutmeg and white pepper are period-appropriate and improve it.
- Italian chestnutsThese are the large sweet European chestnut, still the type sold in autumn markets. Vacuum-packed or jarred cooked chestnuts are a legitimate shortcut: use about 1 lb and skip straight to the sauce.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon on top of a salted white sauce is generous. Salt the sauce lightly and adjust at the end.
- YieldServes four as a vegetable side, or two to three if served as a main dish. It is rich and filling out of proportion to its bulk.
Meatless Cookery belongs to a wave of American cookbooks published around the First World War, when meat conservation was a matter of public campaign as much as private economy, and "meat substitute" chapters filled out with nuts, cheese, beans and eggs. Chestnuts earned a place there because they are starchy rather than oily — closer to a potato than to a walnut — and because they can be given the soft, savoury, sauced character of a hot meat dish. The specification of Italian chestnuts is a quiet marker of date: the chestnut blight, identified in New York in 1904, was destroying the American chestnut through these same decades, a tree that had been a common wild food. Boiling to loosen the skins is one of the standard kitchen methods for any chestnut destined for a sauce or a stuffing.