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Italian Cream
1/2 lb. Italian chestnuts. 2 cups rich milk. 1/2 cup sugar. 3 yolks. 1 tablespoon cornstarch. 1/4 box gelatin. 1/4 cup water. 1 teaspoon vanilla. Boil chestnuts, drain and put through sieve. Soak gelatin in the water and add gradually to hot chestnuts. Make milk, eggs, sugar and corn starch into custard, add chestnuts to this. Stir until cool. Put in border mold, and when ready to serve, fill with whipped cream that has been sweetened and flavored.
A chestnut-custard cream set in a ring mold, from a chapter that treats chestnuts as a vegetable rather than a nut. Two things decide whether it works: the custard must not boil, and the gelatin must be fully dissolved before it meets anything cool.
- The hinge: don't scramble the custardCook the milk, yolks, sugar and cornstarch over low heat or a water bath until it thickens and coats a spoon, around 175-180F. Past that the yolks curdle and no amount of sieving will bring the texture back.
- Gelatin quantityPeriod recipes reckon gelatin by the box, and box sizes were not uniform. A quarter box is on the order of one modern envelope (about 1/4 oz, roughly 2 1/4 teaspoons), and possibly more. Soften it in the 1/4 cup cold water for five minutes, then stir it into the hot chestnut puree until no grains remain.
- Preparing the chestnutsHalf a pound in the shell yields somewhere under a cup of puree. Score the flat side, boil 15-20 minutes, and peel while hot -- both the shell and the inner brown skin have to come off, and they are far harder to remove once cooled.
- Rich milkWhole milk works; half-and-half is closer to what period cooks would have had as 'rich milk,' since early-century milk was sold unhomogenized with the cream still in it.
- Border moldA ring mold, about one quart. Rinse it with cold water or brush it very lightly with a neutral oil before filling so the cream releases cleanly.
- ChillingThe recipe says only "stir until cool." Stir off the initial heat so no skin forms, then refrigerate in the mold at least 4 hours, preferably overnight, before unmolding.
- Yield and servingServes about six. Unmold onto a chilled plate and heap the sweetened whipped cream in the center; a spoonful of chestnut puree held back, or a little rum in the cream, is an optional addition.
Chestnut purees set with gelatin or eggs were a fixture of turn-of-the-century dessert cookery on both sides of the Atlantic, descended from the Italian and French treatment of chestnuts as a sweetened puree -- the same tradition that gives us marrons glacés and Monte Bianco. The specification of Italian chestnuts is not decorative: large Italian chestnuts had long been the standard imported market nut, and by the time Mary A. Wilson was writing for Philadelphia readers, apparently around the late 1910s, the chestnut blight identified in 1904 had already devastated the Northeast. The dish sits in the vegetable chapter because chestnuts were then classed with starchy vegetables rather than nuts, being cooked and mashed like potatoes as well as sugared -- a placement that says more about period kitchen logic than about how the dessert was eaten.