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Chestnut Sauce, Brown
INGREDIENTS for 1 tureen. lb. of chestnuts, 1/2 pint of stock, 2 lumps of sugar, 4 tablespoonfuls of Spanish sauce (see recipe). AVERAGE COST, 8d.
Prepare the chestnuts as in the preceding recipe, by scalding and peeling them; put them in a stewpan with the stock and sugar, and simmer them till tender. When done, add Spanish sauce in the above proportion, and rub the whole through a tammy. Keep this sauce rather liquid, as it is liable to thicken.
TIME.-1 hour to simmer the chestnuts.
A short brown sauce built on Espagnole, thinned and sweetened with chestnuts. Everything hinges on getting the chestnuts fully soft before they meet the sieve.
- Quantity of chestnutsThe weight has dropped out of the ingredient line and only "lb." survives. For half a pint of stock, half a pound of peeled chestnuts gives a sauce of the right body; a full pound would need thinning.
- Spanish sauceThis is sauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce of stock, browned mirepoix and brown roux. Four tablespoons is roughly a quarter cup. A good reduced brown gravy or demi-glace stands in adequately.
- Lumps of sugarLump sugar was cut from a loaf and varied in size, but a lump is usually reckoned at roughly a teaspoon, so two lumps is about two teaspoons. The sugar is there to round the sauce, not to sweeten it noticeably.
- Preparing the chestnutsScore each shell, scald or roast briefly, then peel while hot — the inner brown skin becomes much harder to remove once it cools. Vacuum-packed peeled cooked chestnuts work and cut the simmering to about 15 minutes.
- Simmering timeAn hour suits raw peeled chestnuts in a covered pan over low heat; they should crush without resistance. Undercooked chestnuts will not pass a sieve and leave the sauce gritty.
- The tammyA tammy is a fine worsted cloth through which the sauce was forced with two wooden spoons. A food mill followed by a fine sieve does the same job; a blender alone leaves the papery skin fragments behind.
- ConsistencyChestnut purée sets as it stands, so keep the sauce looser than it looks right. Have extra hot stock beside the pan to slacken it before serving.
- Yield and servingSomething over half a pint; the recipe says only "for 1 tureen." It names no dish, though brown chestnut sauce was conventionally sent up with turkey and game.
Chestnut sauces belong to the section of Victorian cookery that treated the nut as a vegetable rather than a sweet: puréed for soups, stewed as a garnish for braised meats, and thinned into sauces for game. The brown version here is simply the white chestnut sauce given a base of espagnole, and it reflects the English kitchen's steady borrowing of the French sauce system through the nineteenth century — Beeton's readers were expected to have a batch of Spanish sauce already made and referred elsewhere in the book. An entire tureen of the sauce is costed at eightpence.