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Chestnut Salad (One pint of chestnuts salt two)
One pint of chestnuts, salt, two hard boiled eggs, lettuce, French dressing, lemon juice.
Shell, boil and blanch until tender, one pint of chestnuts. Drain, dust with salt, and stand aside to cool. Hard boil two eggs. At serving time arrange the lettuce in a salad bowl, put the chestnuts over, and then a French dressing, using lemon juice in place of vinegar. Hold a small sieve over the bowl, and rub the yolks through it, covering the salad lightly.
A straightforward composed salad whose only real work is the chestnuts. The recipe assumes fresh chestnuts in the shell and a cook who knows how to get the inner skin off them.
- The hinge: the inner skin"Blanch" here means removing the bitter brown pellicle under the shell, not a quick dip in boiling water. Score each nut, boil or roast until the shells crack, then peel both shell and skin while the nuts are still hot — once they cool the pellicle welds itself to the kernel.
- A pint of chestnutsPresumably measured in the shell, since the recipe has you shell them afterwards; that is somewhere around 9-12 oz, yielding perhaps 8 oz or so of peeled meats. Vacuum-packed or jarred cooked chestnuts, roughly 8 oz, work as a substitute and skip the peeling entirely.
- Don't overcookSimmer the peeled nuts only until a knife slides in, about 15–20 minutes depending on size. Pushed further they collapse into purée, which is fine for stuffing and useless in a salad.
- French dressingIn this period the term means a simple oil-and-acid vinaigrette, three parts oil to one part acid with salt and pepper — not the sweet orange bottled dressing of later American shelves. Here the acid is lemon juice throughout.
- Why lemon and not vinegarChestnuts are starchy and faintly sweet, and vinegar reads as harsh against them. Lemon gives the same cut with a rounder finish; use freshly squeezed.
- Sieved yolkThe whites are not used in the dish as written. Press the cooked yolks through a fine sieve once cooled and dry, so they fall as loose crumb rather than paste; the recipe has you do it directly over the bowl at serving time.
- YieldNo yield is given; a pint of chestnuts over lettuce would probably stretch to about four as a first course or side. Dress at the last moment -- the lettuce wilts quickly under oil and the sieved yolk goes soggy.
Chestnuts were a far more ordinary kitchen staple in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than they are now, sold by the pound in autumn and used in stuffings, purees, soups and sweets; American chestnut trees were still abundant when this sort of book was compiled, before the blight first identified in New York in 1904 spread over the following decades to destroy the native species across eastern forests, leaving the market to imported European and Asian nuts. Salads of this kind belong to the vogue for the "composed" salad in Anglo-American cookery of the period, when salad books catalogued dozens of variations on the same formula: a bed of lettuce, one distinctive cooked or raw element, a plain vinaigrette, and a garnish for looks. Sieved hard-boiled yolk scattered over the top was a common finishing flourish; the name mimosa, for its resemblance to the yellow blossom, comes from French usage and is attached to such garnishes, though how widely it was used in English-language salad cookery of this date is less clear.