Candied Chestnuts
INGREDIENTS. - Chestnuts, lemon-juice, clarified sugar.
Take off the outer skin of the nuts, and put them into a pan of boiling water for a minute or so till the second skin comes off easily; after this throw them into another pan of boiling water and boil till tender.
Squeeze the juice of a lemon into a basin of lukewarm water and put the chestnuts in this when done; when cool dip them in clarified sugar (see RECIPE) and lay on a slab to dry.
A short confectionery entry, printed here with a few lines of unrelated type intruding at the start and finish — the phrases "them fine; put them" and "and scale the fish, and mix, with the cress" belong to neighbouring recipes and should be ignored. What remains is a complete method.
- The hinge: skin them while hotThe inner pellicle only peels cleanly while the nut is hot and damp. Work with a few at a time, keeping the rest in the water, and slit the shells first — a shallow cross cut through to the flesh makes both skins lift.
- Boiling till tenderPeeled chestnuts take roughly 15 to 25 minutes at a bare simmer, depending on size and freshness. A hard boil breaks them up; the finished sweets need to stay whole, so keep the water just trembling.
- The lemon waterThis is not for flavour. Acidulated lukewarm water helps keep the cooked nuts from darkening. The recipe gives no volume beyond 'a basin', so the juice of one lemon to roughly a litre of water is a reasonable working strength.
- Clarified sugarBeeton's clarified sugar is sugar and water boiled and skimmed, traditionally with beaten egg white to lift the scum; modern sugar is refined enough that this step is largely unnecessary. The recipe specifies no degree of boiling: a syrup taken to about the soft-ball stage (roughly 115C) gives a soft glaze, and one nearer soft crack (roughly 135C) a more brittle shell.
- Dry the nuts before dippingThe recipe moves straight from the lemon water to the syrup, but wet chestnuts will seize the sugar and make it grainy. Drain and blot each one thoroughly first.
- The slabA marble slab was standard confectioner's kit for its cool surface. Baking parchment on a chilled tray does the same job; leave the nuts several hours, uncovered, in a dry room.
- Yield and keepingA pound (450 g) of chestnuts in the shell gives roughly 350 g peeled, about 25 to 30 sweets. They keep a week in an airtight tin between layers of paper, and go sticky in a damp kitchen.
Candied chestnuts are the domestic cousin of marrons glacés, the French confection generally traced to the chestnut-growing districts of Ardèche and Piedmont, where the nut was a staple rather than a luxury and candying was a way of turning a glut into something that would keep and sell. The professional version steeps the nuts in progressively stronger syrups over several days; Beeton's is the compressed household form — boil, dip, dry — which produces a sweet closer to a glazed nut than a true glacé. Its presence in a general household compendium reflects how much Victorian home cooking absorbed from the confectioner's trade, and how much of the year's chestnut crop, arriving in Britain in autumn, had to be dealt with quickly before it moulded or dried out.