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Chestnut Stuffing
1 quart chestnuts 1/4 cup bread-crums 2 tablespoons butter or other fat 2 tablespoons cream Salt and pepper Onion-juice, if desired Shell and blanch the chestnuts and cook in boiling water until tender. While they are still hot, rub them through a coarse sieve or colander. Add other ingredients in order given.
A plain chestnut purée stuffing, closer to a dense forcemeat than the bready stuffings most cooks expect. The whole dish stands or falls on getting the chestnuts peeled cleanly and mashed while hot.
- What a quart of chestnuts isMeasured in the shell, a quart is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb, which yields something like 2 cups of purée. About 1 lb of vacuum-packed peeled chestnuts, simmered until soft, gives a comparable result with none of the peeling.
- Shell and blanchCut an X through the shell on the flat side of each nut, then boil or roast briefly to loosen both the shell and the bitter brown inner skin. Peel a few at a time and keep the rest hot: once they cool the pellicle grips and will not come away.
- The hingeSieve the chestnuts while they are still hot. Cooled chestnut goes waxy and pasty, and forcing it through a sieve then produces a gluey mass rather than a light purée. A ricer or food mill does the same work faster than a colander.
- Cooking timeBoil the peeled nuts 20 to 30 minutes, until a knife goes through with no resistance at the center. Undercooked chestnut will not sieve at all.
- Bread-crumsThe quarter cup is there to absorb moisture and give the pur\that job more reliably than fresh soft ones.
- Onion-juiceGrate half a small onion on a fine grater and press the pulp in a sieve; a teaspoon or two of the liquid is plenty. It flavors without adding the water and texture of chopped onion.
- Yield and useAbout 2 1/2 cups, enough for a roasting chicken, a pair of guinea fowl, or as one of two stuffings in a turkey. For a 12 lb bird, double it.
- If you stuff a birdFill loosely just before roasting, never in advance, and take the center of the stuffing to 165F. A dense purée like this heats slowly, so check with a thermometer rather than trusting the bird's timing. Baking it in a buttered dish alongside is simpler and gives a browned top.