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Puree of Chestnuts
Make a little slit in each chestnut, boil them till tender, then put them in another pan with cold water in it and replace them on the fire. Peel them one by one as you take them out, and rub them through a sieve, pounding them first to make it easier, add salt, a good lump of butter and a little milk to make a nice puree. This is very good to surround grilled chicken or turkey legs, or for a salmi of duck or hare.
Hors d'CEuvres The attractive "savory" of English dinner tables finds its counterpart apparently in egg and fish dishes served cold at the beginning of a meal, and therefore what we should hall hors d'oeuvres.
A working method rather than a formula — no quantities are given, so treat it as a technique and season by taste. Note that the last two sentences of the transcription are a stray section heading and its opening line, carried over from the following page of the book; they do not belong to the chestnut puree.
- The hinge: peel them hotThe point of the second pan of cold water returned to the fire is to keep the chestnuts hot while you work through them one at a time. Both the outer shell and the inner brown pellicle lift away cleanly from a hot nut and cling stubbornly to a cool one, so take them out singly and leave the rest in the water.
- The slitCut through the shell on the flat side, not the domed side, and go deep enough to break the pellicle. This stops the nuts bursting and gives the peel somewhere to start.
- QuantitiesThe recipe gives none. As a rough working guide, about 2 lb of chestnuts in the shell will serve four to six as a garnish, yielding perhaps 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb peeled depending on how many nuts are sound. A "good lump of butter" might be 2 to 3 tablespoons; milk goes in a splash at a time until the puree just holds a shape.
- Boiling timeTwenty-five to thirty-five minutes at a steady boil for whole chestnuts in the shell. They are done when a nut crushes with no resistance at the centre; undercooked chestnuts stay chalky and no amount of sieving will fix it.
- Pounding and sievingA potato ricer or a food mill does the whole job in one pass and is closer to the original texture than a food processor, which can turn cooked chestnut gluey. If you use a machine, pulse briefly and finish by hand.
- ShortcutVacuum-packed cooked and peeled chestnuts, sold in autumn and winter, need only to be simmered in milk until soft and then riced. They are sweeter and softer than fresh, so hold back on the milk.
- SalmiA salmi is a rich braise of game, usually part-roasted first and finished in a sauce made from the trimmings. The puree is there to absorb it, so keep it stiff rather than loose if that is what you are serving it with.
- Holding itThe puree stiffens as it cools and reheats badly over direct heat. Keep it in a bowl over hot water and beat in a little more warm milk before it goes to the table.
Chestnuts were a staple starch across much of southern Europe — Iberia, Corsica, Italy, southern France — long before they became a seasonal luxury, and the puree here is meant to accompany game: hare, duck, and the grilled poultry legs the author mentions. The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in Britain during the First World War from recipes supplied by Belgian refugees, which accounts for the book's habit of glancing sideways at English practice, as the stray line about "savories" and hors d'oeuvres does here. The measurements are correspondingly vague. The pairing of chestnut puree with game is still standard in Belgian and French kitchens, and the two-pan peeling trick described here is a practical way to do the job by hand.