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Chestnut Stuffing (Pound chestnuts truffles can)
1 pound chestnuts 6 truffles 1 can mushrooms 1 slice raw ham 1 ounce mustard seed 2 cucumber pickles 1/4 teaspoon allspice 1/4 teaspoon cloves 2 tablespoons minced parsley 1 tablespoon onion, minced 1 egg, slightly beaten 1 teaspoon salt Boil the nuts till tender enough to chop fine; cut the truffles into strips and chop all the other ingredients. Add seasonings and spices, bind all together with a raw egg.
A dense, highly seasoned forcemeat rather than a bread stuffing, and the original assumes you know it goes into a bird and gets roasted. A few of its ingredients need translating.
- Cook the stuffing throughNo cooking instruction is given because the mixture was meant to be packed into a bird and roasted with it. It contains raw egg and raw cured ham, so whether stuffed or baked in a dish it must reach 165F at the centre.
- ChestnutsScore an X through the shell of each nut before boiling, and peel while still hot — the inner skin will not come away once they cool. A pound in the shell gives roughly 10-12 oz of usable nut. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts are an honest substitute.
- TrufflesIn American cookbooks of this period a count of truffles usually meant small preserved black truffles from a tin rather than fresh winter truffles sold by weight. A teaspoon or two of truffle paste, or an ounce of finely chopped preserved truffle, gets you to the same place without spending more on garnish than on the bird.
- Canned mushroomsCanned mushrooms of the period were typically small whole buttons in brine. Drain and press them dry before chopping, or use 6-8 oz of fresh mushrooms sauteed until their liquid has gone; wet mushrooms will make the stuffing sodden.
- Raw hamThis is uncooked cured ham — prosciutto crudo, speck, or a slice of raw country ham. It is there for salt and fat, so cut back the added teaspoon of salt if your ham is a heavily cured one.
- Mustard seedAn ounce is roughly two to three tablespoons of whole seed, which is aggressive in a mixture this size and will stay crunchy. Bruise it in a mortar first, or read it as ground mustard and use a scant teaspoon.
- Cucumber picklesSmall sour dill or brine-cured gherkins, not sweet pickle. Chop fine and squeeze out the brine.
- Binding and yieldOne egg barely holds this together; it is meant to be packed, not spooned. Expect roughly 3 cups — enough for a 4-5 lb chicken or capon, or a light stuffing for the neck end of a small turkey.
Chestnut stuffing for roast poultry is an old European habit that the American cookbooks of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries inherited wholesale, chestnuts being cheap and plentiful before the blight that spread from the early 1900s and had destroyed the American chestnut as a commercial crop by the mid-twentieth century. What marks this version as a company dish rather than an everyday one is the shopping list: truffles, canned mushrooms and raw ham were all relatively costly or imported goods. The style — no breadcrumbs, everything minced and bound with egg — is closer to a French farce than to the sage-and-bread stuffings of the same period, and the pickles and mustard seed pull against the sweetness of the chestnuts.