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Chestnut (Spanish) Soup
INGREDIENTS for 1 quart. lbs. of Spanish chestnuts, pint of cream; seasoning to taste, of salt, cayenne, and mace; 1 quart of stock. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 2d.
Take the outer rind from the chestnuts, and put them into a large pan of warm water. As soon as this becomes too hot for the fingers to remain in it, take out the chestnuts, peel them quickly, and immerse CHICKENS, BOILED. them in cold water, and wipe and weigh them. Now cover them with good stock, and stew them gently for rather more than of an hour, or until they break when touched with a fork; then drain, pound, and rub them through a fine sieve reversed; add sufficient stock, mace, cayenne and salt, and stir it often until it boils, and put in the cream. The stock in which the chestnuts are boiled can be used for the soup, when its sweetness is not objected to, or it may, in part, be added to it; and the rule is that lb. of chestnuts should be given to each quart of soup.
TIME. Rather more than 1 hour.
SEASONABLE from October to February. - Chickens, Boiled.
INGREDIENTS. A pair of chickens, water. AVERAGE COST, 5s. per pair.
A smooth chestnut velouté thickened by the nuts themselves rather than flour. Beeton's own rule — about half a pound of peeled chestnuts to each quart of soup — is the useful figure to work from, since several of the printed quantities here have lost their fractions.
- QuantitiesThe fractions have dropped out of this text: the list reads 'lbs. of Spanish chestnuts' and 'pint of cream', and the closing rule reads 'lb. of chestnuts should be given to each quart of soup', so the exact amounts cannot be recovered from the page as printed. Working from about 1 lb of chestnuts in the shell (roughly half a pound peeled) to 1 quart of stock, with cream added to taste rather than by the pint, gives a workable soup.
- PeelingThe warm-water method described works, but scoring an X through the shell of each nut and roasting at 400F for 15-20 minutes, then peeling while hot, is faster and takes the inner brown pellicle off with the shell. Any pellicle left behind tastes bitter and will not pass the sieve.
- Vacuum-packed chestnutsPeeled cooked chestnuts sold in jars or vacuum packs are an honest substitute — about 8 oz for a quart of soup. They are already tender, so 15 minutes in the stock is enough before pureeing.
- Cooking timeFresh peeled chestnuts need 25-40 minutes at a bare simmer, less than the "rather more than 1 hour" given in the heading. They are ready when a fork crushes them without resistance.
- Sieve or blenderPounding and passing through a fine sieve is the period technique; a blender followed by a single pass through a fine strainer gives the same texture in a fraction of the time. Chestnuts are starchy and can turn gluey if over-blended, so work in short bursts.
- MaceGround mace is the outer covering of nutmeg, milder and more floral. A scant 1/4 teaspoon per quart is plenty; grated nutmeg at half the quantity will stand in.
- The cream goes in lastAdd it off the boil and reheat only to steaming. Boiled cream in a starchy chestnut base can separate and catch on the pan bottom.
- Stock and sweetnessThe chestnut cooking liquid is sweet, as Beeton notes. Using half of it and half fresh stock keeps the soup from tasting like dessert; a squeeze of lemon or a dry sherry at the end sharpens it further.
- YieldA quart serves four as a first course. It thickens considerably on standing, so hold back a little stock to loosen it on reheating.
Chestnuts were a staple starch across southern Europe long before they became a garnish, and the "Spanish" chestnut of English cookbooks is Castanea sativa, the sweet chestnut, distinguished in Victorian kitchens from the inedible horse chestnut of park avenues. Soups of this kind belong to a family of Georgian and Victorian purees — of turnip, of green pea, of almond — in which a pounded vegetable, forced through a hair sieve, does the work now done by a blender and often by flour. The seasonable note, October to February, is a real constraint rather than a formality: chestnuts were sold fresh from the autumn harvest and go mouldy quickly, so the soup was a cold-weather dish by necessity as much as by inclination. It is costed at a shilling and twopence per quart, chestnuts being a street food of the poor as well as an ingredient of genteel cookery.