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Nut Puree
3 ounces walnuts 3 ounces almonds 3 ounces chestnuts or Brazils 4 ounces biscuits 1/2 pint of cream 1/4 pint milk A few drops of vanilla Blanch the almonds, and remove every particle of skin from the walnuts and chestnuts, or Brazils, put them all through a nut mill, and mix well together. Boil the milk separately, and pour over the nuts; allow it to cool, then add the cream and vanilla, and beat all thoroughly together. Put the biscuits, sweet or plain ones, into a glass dish, and pour the mixture over, and allow it to stand two hours. A little whipped cream may be put on the top, if liked, or a few ratafia biscuits and crystallized cherries.
An uncooked cream-and-nut dessert layered over biscuits, closer to a trifle than a puree in the modern sense. Two things decide whether it works: how finely the nuts are ground, and whether you sweeten it.
- Imperial pintsThis is a British book, so a pint is 20 fl oz. Half a pint of cream is 1 1/4 cups (10 fl oz) and a quarter pint of milk is 2/3 cup (5 fl oz). Use heavy or whipping cream.
- Biscuits means cookiesFour ounces of plain or sweet biscuits — digestives, Marie, petit-beurre or shortbread all suit. Ratafias are small hard almond macaroons; amaretti are the closest thing on most shelves.
- SweeteningNo sugar is listed, and the only sweetness comes from the biscuits. Taste the cooled nut mixture and expect to add 2 to 3 tablespoons of caster sugar before the cream goes in, unless you are using very sweet biscuits.
- The nut millA rotary nut mill produced a dry, fluffy grind. A food processor will turn nuts to paste if you let it run, so pulse in short bursts and stop while the texture is still sandy.
- ChestnutsUse them peeled and cooked — vacuum-packed or canned whole chestnuts work directly. Raw chestnuts are hard, starchy and near-impossible to skin without scoring and roasting or boiling them first.
- Skinning walnutsRemoving every particle of walnut skin by hand is the fiddliest step in the recipe. A brief blanch in boiling water helps loosen it, though walnut skin is stubborn and rarely comes away completely; the skins are tannic and bitter, which may well be why the original insists.
- Pour the milk hotBoiling milk over the ground nuts softens them and draws out flavour. Let it cool properly before the cream goes in, or the cream will thin out and refuse to hold any body.
- Standing timeTwo hours in the refrigerator, not at room temperature. The biscuits need that long to soften through; overnight is better still and the dish will not suffer.
- YieldServes four to six as written, in a glass bowl of about 1 1/2 quarts. Rich enough that small portions are the sensible measure.
Vegetarian cookery books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries leaned hard on nuts, which were promoted as the substitute for meat — the protein and the fat that a meatless table was accused of lacking. Nut mills and nut butters were sold to the same households that bought these books, and recipes like this one treat walnuts, almonds and chestnuts as a staple ingredient rather than a garnish. The dessert itself belongs to the wide family of English cold puddings built on biscuits soaked in a cream mixture, of which trifle is the best-known member; ratafia biscuits, the little almond macaroons, take their name from the almond-flavoured cordial and were a common finish for dishes of that family. The word puree is used loosely here — the nuts are milled fine rather than reduced to a true paste — and carries none of the strained-vegetable sense it usually has now.