Home › Entrées › Chestnuts en Casserole
Chestnuts en Casserole
Remove shells from three cups chestnuts, put in a casserole dish, and pour over three cups highly seasoned chicken stock. Cover, and cook in a slow oven three hours; then thicken chicken stock with two tablespoons butter and one and one-half tablespoons flour cooked together. Send to table in casserole dish. 1 cup scalded milk
A simple braise that depends entirely on the stock and on not overcooking the nuts. Two things in the printed text need addressing before you begin.
- The stray last line"1 cup scalded milk" belongs to no step in this recipe and looks like a printing error, perhaps carried over from a neighbouring entry. Ignore it.
- Three hours is too longThree hours is a long time for chestnuts -- they are starchy and tender, and in a slow oven they will likely be done in roughly 45 to 60 minutes and will soften a good deal further after that. Cook covered until a skewer meets no resistance, then thicken the liquid.
- A slow ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; "slow oven" is conventionally read as somewhere in the 250-325F range. If you want the surface to reduce and glaze slightly at the end, uncover and raise the heat for the last ten minutes.
- Casserole, in this bookCasserole -- the instruction to "send to table in casserole dish" shows the word here means a covered dish that goes to the table, not a saucepan. Any lidded baking dish that looks presentable will serve.
- Shelling and peeling"Remove shells" understates the work: the inner brown pellicle must come off too or it turns bitter and papery. Score each nut, roast or boil five minutes, and peel while hot. Note that the recipe measures three cups before shelling, so any weight equivalent is approximate. Vacuum-packed peeled chestnuts are a reasonable substitute and need appreciably less time.
- The thickeningThe butter and flour are cooked together as a roux, then whisked into the hot stock off the heat and simmered a minute or two to lose the raw flour taste. Two tablespoons butter to one and a half of flour gives a light sauce; the stock should coat, not set.
- Highly seasonedThe recipe insists on it. If using boxed broth, reduce it by a third first and add a bay leaf, thyme and a little sherry or Madeira, or the finished dish tastes flat.
- YieldLikely four to six as a side dish. The excerpt gives no section heading to show how the original placed it.
Chestnuts appear repeatedly in American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s as a vegetable and an entrée in their own right, not merely as stuffing: the American chestnut was still abundant in eastern forests, and street vendors and markets sold the nuts cheaply through autumn and winter. The chestnut blight, first identified in New York in 1904, effectively removed that tree from the landscape within a few decades, which is why dishes like this one read as unfamiliar today. The "en casserole" label reflects the period's enthusiasm for French service terms and for the fashionable covered earthenware dish that traveled from oven to table.