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Chestnut Salad (Chestnuts mayonnaise dressing)
Chestnuts, mayonnaise dressing, lettuce.
Parboil the chestnuts ten minutes and remove the shells, then cook them in boiling water until soft but not broken. Remove the thin brown skin, cut in quarter-inch slices, moisten with mayonnaise dressing. Arrange on cup-shaped lettuce leaves and cover with mayonnaise.
A short recipe that lives or dies on the chestnuts: they must be tender enough to slice cleanly but not collapsing, and the inner skin must come off entirely.
- The hinge: peel while hotThe hinge: peel while warm -- The thin brown pellicle lifts away most easily while the nut is hot and steaming. Work in small batches, keeping the rest in the hot water; scoring an X through the shell of each nut before the ten-minute parboil helps the shell split open.
- Quantity and yieldThe original gives no amounts. About 1 lb of chestnuts in the shell yields roughly 2 cups peeled, which dresses four salads.
- Total cooking timeTen minutes parboiling loosens the shell but leaves the nut raw. Expect a further 15 to 25 minutes at a bare simmer after peeling, depending on size; test with a knife tip rather than the clock, and keep the water below a rolling boil so the nuts do not knock themselves apart.
- ShortcutVacuum-packed or jarred cooked chestnuts skip both boilings entirely. They are already skinned and only need slicing; they are softer than freshly boiled nuts, so slice a little thicker than a quarter inch.
- Chestnuts are not interchangeableThis means the sweet European or American chestnut, Castanea, sold in autumn and winter. Water chestnuts and horse chestnuts are unrelated, and horse chestnuts are inedible.
- MayonnaiseMayonnaise in cookbooks of this period was generally homemade and stiffer than a modern jarred spread, closer to a sauce than a spread; the seasoning varied from book to book. Thin commercial mayonnaise with a little lemon juice if you want it to coat rather than clot on the slices.
- The lettuce cups"Cup-shaped lettuce leaves" means the inner leaves of a head lettuce, such as butterhead or a crisphead type, which hold their shape as bowls. Flat loose-leaf lettuce holds the shape less well.
- ServingDress and assemble shortly before serving. Boiled chestnuts turn pasty as they sit in dressing, and the salad is best barely cool rather than refrigerator-cold.
Chestnut salad belongs to a moment when American cookbooks were expanding the definition of "salad" well past greens, encouraging cooks to try nuts, cooked vegetables and fruit under mayonnaise. Chestnuts were then a familiar and cheap autumn commodity in the eastern United States, where the American chestnut was one of the dominant forest trees; the blight that spread in the early twentieth century destroyed it as a nut crop, and most chestnuts on sale today are of European or Asian origin. The lettuce cup filled with a mayonnaise-bound mixture is a characteristic presentation of the era, and the same formula carries chicken, celery and walnut salads through cookbooks of the period.