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Scalloped Chestnuts
1 dozen chestnuts 1/2 pint milk 1 onion the size of a walnut 1 ounce of butter Pepper and salt Bread crumbs Prepare the chestnuts exactly as in the preceding recipe until they are rubbed through a sieve. Then add three tablespoons of the milk in which the chestnuts were stewed, and a little pepper and salt. Now put the mixture in buttered scallop shells, and cover with bread crumbs. Break up the butter in small bits, and place it over the scallops; then put in hot oven for a few minutes to brown.
A small savoury gratin that depends entirely on the omitted first step: the chestnuts must be peeled, stewed in milk with the onion until they collapse, and pushed through a sieve before any of this makes sense.
- The missing stepThe preceding recipe is not reproduced here, so this is inference from what the text assumes: score and boil the chestnuts briefly, peel off both the shell and the inner brown skin while hot, then simmer them in the milk with the small onion until completely soft, probably 25-35 minutes. Sieve or rice them, reserving the milk.
- Half a pint8 fluid ounces if the book is American, 10 if British; nothing in the recipe settles it. Most of it is cooking liquid rather than an ingredient in the finished dish; only three tablespoons of it goes back into the puree.
- An onion the size of a walnutAbout one tablespoon chopped, or a shallot. It is there to flavour the milk and can be lifted out before sieving if you want a smoother purée.
- Hot oven425-450F. The dish is already cooked through, so this is browning only: 8-10 minutes, or a couple of minutes under the broiler.
- Scallop shellsIndividual shells were standard serving vessels for small hot dishes. Ramekins, gratin dishes or a shallow ovenproof plate work identically; a dozen chestnuts fills two small shells.
- Jarred chestnutsVacuum-packed or canned unsweetened whole chestnuts skip the peeling and need only 10 minutes in the milk. Avoid sweetened chestnut purée, which is a dessert product and will ruin the dish.
- SeasoningChestnut purée is bland and absorbs salt heavily. Season the purée before it goes into the shells, and taste it; a scrape of nutmeg or a spoonful of grated cheese in the crumbs is in keeping.
- YieldA dozen chestnuts is a garnish-sized quantity, enough for two as a side. Scale up freely; the proportion that matters is just enough reserved milk to loosen the purée.
Cooks have long leaned on the chestnut because it behaves less like a nut than like a starchy vegetable, with a mild sweetness and a floury body that could stand in for a meat course rather than accompany one. There was an era, before the chestnut blight stripped the American chestnut from eastern forests, when the nuts were a cheap autumn commodity sold by the peck and roasted on city streets; today most cooks buy imported Italian and Spanish chestnuts instead. The scallop shell is the other period marker, said to have been the original sense of "scalloped," which came to mean anything baked with crumbs and cream.