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How to Shell and Blanch Chestnuts
Score the shell of each nut, and put into a frying-pan with a teaspoonful of butter for each pint of nuts. Shake the pan over the fire until the butter is melted; then set in the oven five minutes. With a sharp knife remove the shells and skins together.
A preparation step rather than a finished dish, and one that still works: the butter conducts heat to the shell and the brief oven stint loosens the inner skin so both come away in one piece.
- Score every nut, without exceptionA chestnut left whole builds steam inside and can burst in the oven. Cut through the shell on the flat side, deep enough to part the papery pellicle beneath but not into the flesh.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature; "the oven" here implies a hot one, and the five minutes is only meant to loosen the skins, not to cook the nut through.
- A pint of chestnutsMeasured whole in the shell; a pint comes to roughly three-quarters of a pound, perhaps twenty to thirty nuts depending on size. The teaspoon of butter per pint is there to coat, not to fry.
- Peel them hotThis is the hinge. The pellicle clings the moment the nut cools, so work with a towel over the pan and take out three or four at a time, returning the rest to the warm oven.
- Sorting firstDrop the nuts in a bowl of water and discard any that float, and any that rattle or feel hollow. Old chestnuts dry out inside the shell and no amount of heat will make them peel cleanly.
- What they are forBlanched chestnuts of this sort go into salads and chafing-dish mixtures. If you want them tender rather than merely peeled, simmer the shelled nuts in stock or salted water for 15 to 20 minutes afterward.
- SeasonFresh chestnuts are an autumn and early winter item and go moldy quickly at room temperature. Keep them refrigerated in a paper bag and use within a week or two.
Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing Dish Dainties appeared in 1899, when the chafing dish was fashionable among city households and chestnuts were a cheap, abundant autumn staple in the eastern United States. The American chestnut then formed a large share of the forest canopy from Maine to Georgia, and nuts were gathered and hawked by the bushel; the blight, first noticed in New York in 1904, all but eliminated the tree from commerce within a few decades. The chestnuts sold today are largely Italian, Spanish, Chinese or Korean varieties, generally larger and easier to peel than the small sweet American nut, which is one reason the butter-and-oven trick is more forgiving now than it was then.