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Chestnut Fritters
Take twenty good chestnuts and roast them on a slow fire so that they won't color. Remove the shells without breaking the nuts, and put them into a saucepan with one level tablespoon of powdered sugar and one-half glass of milk and a little vanilla. Cover the saucepan and let it cook slowly (simmer)for more than a half-hour. Then drain the chestnuts and pass them through a sieve. Put them back in a bowl with one-half a tablespoon of butter, the yolks of three eggs, and mix well without cooking. Allow them to cool, and then take a small portion at a time, the size of a nut, roll them, dip them in egg, and in bread crumbs, and fry in butter and lard, a few at a time. Serve hot with powdered sugar.
Chestnuts "alla Lucifero" Take forty good chestnuts and roast them over a slow fire. Do not allow them to become dried up or colored. Remove the shells carefully, put them in a bowl, and pour over them one-half a glass of rum and two or three tablespoons of powdered sugar. Set fire to the rum and baste the chestnuts constantly as long as the rum will burn, turning the chestnuts about so they will absorb the rum and become colored.
Two related chestnut sweets: a croquette-style fritter and a rum-flamed dish. Both depend on peeling roasted chestnuts cleanly, which is the step that decides how much work the rest will be.
- The hinge: peel them hotScore each chestnut with an X through the shell before roasting, and peel while they are still too hot to hold comfortably, using a cloth. The inner brown pellicle comes away with the shell when hot and welds itself on as they cool; reheat any stragglers rather than fighting them.
- "Roast on a slow fire so that they won't color"The point is to loosen the shell without drying the flesh, since these chestnuts still have to simmer and puree. A dry pan over low heat gets the shells splitting while the interiors stay moist; the recipe gives no oven and no temperature, and a hot oven would color them, which it forbids.
- QuantitiesTwenty chestnuts is roughly 10-12 oz in the shell, perhaps 8 oz peeled. "Half a glass" is not a fixed measure; read it as somewhere around 100-125 ml, a scant half cup. That is enough milk to keep the nuts moist rather than to cover them, so use a small pan and check it does not boil dry.
- Simmering time"More than a half-hour" is right for older, drier chestnuts. Test with a knife tip: they should collapse under no pressure at all. Anything short of that gives a grainy purée that will not hold together when rolled.
- SievingA potato ricer does in one pass what the sieve does slowly, and gives the light texture the recipe is after. Push the chestnuts through while warm.
- Chilling matters"Allow them to cool" is not optional; the yolk-and-butter paste is slack when warm and will not roll. An hour in the refrigerator makes it firm enough to shape into walnut-sized balls. If it is still sticky, a spoonful of fine dry breadcrumb in the mix helps without dulling the flavor.
- Frying fatButter and lard together was a common Italian frying mixture; the lard raises the smoke point, the butter supplies flavor. Keep the fat around 340-350F and fry a few at a time as directed, or the crumb coating browns before the centers heat through. Clarified butter with a neutral oil is a workable substitute.
- YieldA small batch; twenty chestnuts will not make many nut-sized fritters. Dust with confectioners' sugar and serve straight from the pan; they soften within minutes.
- The rum flambéWarm the rum before lighting it, keep the pan off the heat and away from the extractor hood while it burns, and have a lid to hand. The burning rum both colors and glazes the chestnuts, so keep basting until the flame dies of its own accord rather than smothering it early.
Chestnuts carried much of mountain Italy through the winter for centuries, ground into flour where wheat would not grow and eaten roasted, boiled in milk, or candied into marrons glac his this one, which simmers them with sugar, milk and vanilla before sieving them, sits at the point where a peasant staple turns into a dessert: the same pur":