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Boiled Chestnuts
Boil the chestnuts a few minutes; drain and remove the shells and skins. Boil again until tender, adding sufficient salt to make them palatable. Drain again; shake over the fire until dry; cover with cream sauce and serve at once. If allowed to stand the chestnuts become heavy and unappetizing.
A short recipe that depends almost entirely on peeling the nuts while they are hot and serving them the moment they are sauced.
- Peel hot, not warmThe first boil is only to loosen the shell and the inner pellicle; five minutes is enough. Work on a few at a time and keep the rest in the hot water, because the papery skin clings fast as soon as it cools.
- Score them firstThe recipe does not mention it, but cutting an X through the shell on the flat side before the first boil makes the nuts much easier to shell.
- Second boilPeeled chestnuts take 15-25 minutes in salted water depending on size and age. They should crush easily against the side of the pan but still hold their shape; past that they collapse into the sauce.
- "Shake over the fire until dry"Return the drained nuts to the empty hot pan over low heat and toss for a minute so the surface steam evaporates. This keeps the cream sauce from thinning into a puddle.
- Cream sauceNo sauce recipe is given here. A cream sauce of this kind is generally a plain white sauce made with milk or cream -- on the order of 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and a cup of milk or light cream, seasoned with salt and pepper.
- Why the warning about standingChestnuts are starchy, and as they cool the starch firms and the nuts turn dense and pasty. Reheating does not fully restore them, so cook them to land with the rest of the meal.
- QuantityNo amount is given. Around 1 1/2 lb of chestnuts in the shell will give something over 1 lb peeled, which should serve four to six as a side dish.
Boiled chestnuts belong to the long stretch when the nut was treated as a vegetable and a starch rather than a holiday novelty. American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries call for them in stuffings, purees, croquettes and dishes like this one, served in cream sauce alongside poultry and game; the large, sweet imported Italian and Spanish chestnuts were a familiar market item in eastern cities. The native American chestnut, then still a common forest tree, produced smaller and sweeter nuts and was widely gathered, but the blight identified in New York in 1904 destroyed the species as a timber and nut tree over the following decades. That collapse is a large part of why a recipe like this reads as unfamiliar now: the vegetable it treats as ordinary became, in the space of one generation, an import.