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Roasted Chestnuts
With a sharp knife cut across on the flat side of each chestnut; put them in a wire pan and shake constantly over a hot fire until the shells split. Serve at once.
Four lines of instruction, and nearly all of the risk is in the first one. Cut every nut before it meets heat.
- The cut is not optionalA chestnut is a sealed shell full of moisture; heated whole and intact it will burst and throw hot fragments. Score each one right through the shell and the brown inner skin, an X or a single long slit across the flat face.
- The wire panThis is a long-handled roaster with a perforated or mesh bottom, the same tool used for popcorn over a coal range. A dry cast-iron skillet with a lid, shaken often, does the same job on a gas or electric burner; a perforated grill pan works over charcoal.
- "A hot fire"Roughly medium-high on a modern burner. In the oven, 425F on a sheet pan, cut side up, shaking once or twice, is the easiest equivalent.
- TimingThe recipe gives none. Expect 15 to 25 minutes depending on size and freshness; they are done when the shells have peeled back at the cut and the flesh inside is tender to the point of a knife, not merely split.
- Peel while hotThe papery pellicle under the shell clings hard once the nuts cool and turns bitter chewy work. Wrap the batch in a towel for a few minutes after roasting, then shell a few at a time and keep the rest covered.
- Choosing nutsBuy heavy, glossy nuts with no rattle and no give when pressed; a light nut has dried out and will be woody. Most chestnuts sold now are imported -- Italian, Spanish or Korean among them -- and are larger than the American nuts this book assumed.
- QuantityAbout 1 lb serves four as a side or a nibble, and yields roughly 10 to 12 oz shelled.
Chestnuts sit under Vegetables rather than Nuts here because that is how they were eaten: a starchy, low-oil nut treated as a bulk food, boiled and mashed for stuffing, simmered with sprouts or cabbage, or simply roasted and passed at the end of a meal. The book dates from the period in which the American chestnut was disappearing, the blight Cryphonectria parasitica being generally traced to nursery stock identified in New York early in the twentieth century and spreading through the eastern forests over the following decades. A cook of the 1910s could still buy native chestnuts cheaply by the peck in season; within a generation the trade had shifted almost entirely to imported European nuts, which is what the same recipe will get you today. The wire roasting pan shaken over the fire is the older method, older than the domestic range itself, and survives on winter street corners in much of Europe.