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Chestnut Gravy
To two cups thin Turkey Gravy add three-fourths cup cooked and mashed chesnuts.
A two-line recipe that assumes you already have a pan of turkey gravy and a bowl of cooked chestnuts on the stove — which, in a Thanksgiving kitchen of the period, you would have. Everything worth saying is about those two assumptions.
- "Thin" gravy"Thin" here means the lighter, more pourable gravy — pan drippings and turkey stock only lightly thickened with flour rather than heavily. The mashed chestnuts thicken it further, so start looser than you want to finish.
- Three-fourths cup mashedThat is the volume after cooking, peeling and mashing — roughly 6 oz of shelled chestnuts, or about half a pound in the shell. Vacuum-packed or jarred cooked chestnuts work directly; simmer them 10 minutes in stock or milk until they crush easily under a fork.
- Avoid sweetened puréeCanned crème de marrons and most French chestnut purée in tubes are sugared and vanilla-scented. Look for unsweetened chestnut purée or whole cooked chestnuts only.
- Texture is the hingeMashed chestnuts stay grainy no matter how long you beat them. Pass the gravy through a fine sieve, or give it a short blitz with a stick blender, if you want it smooth; otherwise expect a slightly granular, almost velouté-like body.
- Season after, not beforeChestnuts are starchy and faintly sweet, and they mute salt considerably. Taste and correct salt and pepper once the purée is in, and consider a spoonful of sherry or a scrape of nutmeg to lift it.
- YieldAbout 2 3/4 cups finished gravy, enough for eight to ten servings alongside a roast bird.
Chestnut gravy, chestnut stuffing and chestnut purée cluster together in American cookbooks of the 1880s through the 1910s, when chestnuts were a cheap autumn commodity gathered and sold by the bushel rather than an imported delicacy. The tree that supplied them was the American chestnut, once a dominant hardwood of the eastern forests; the blight that effectively destroyed it was identified in New York in 1904, and within a few decades the nuts in American markets were largely European and Asian imports, at import prices. That shift is a good part of why a recipe this offhand — assuming a cook has cooked chestnuts to hand at Thanksgiving, needing only one sentence to say what to do with them — reads as more exotic now than it did when Farmer wrote it. The pairing itself is older and broadly European, chestnuts having long been used to thicken and sweeten sauces for roast poultry and game in French and Italian cooking.