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Chestnuts
French and Italian chestnuts are served in place of vegetables. Chestnut Purée Kemove shells from chestnuts, cook until soft in boiling salted water; drain, mash, moisten with scalded milk, season with salt and pepper, and beat until light. Chestnuts are often boiled, riced, and piled lightly in centre of dish, then surrounded by meat.
Farmer gives no quantities here, which is normal for a vegetable entry in this book. The work is all in the peeling; everything after that is straightforward.
- Two skins, not one"Remove shells" means both the hard outer shell and the bitter brown pellicle beneath it. Cut an X through the shell on the flat side, boil or roast for a few minutes, then peel while still hot — the inner skin clings hard once the nuts cool.
- What to buy"French and Italian chestnuts" means the large sweet European chestnut, Castanea sativa, sold fresh in autumn and winter. Vacuum-packed or jarred cooked chestnuts work for purée and save the peeling entirely; the dry-roasted or candied kinds do not.
- Quantity and yieldFarmer gives no quantities. As a rough guide, about 1 1/2 lb of chestnuts in the shell (a little over a pound once peeled) will serve four as a side, giving roughly 2 cups of finished purée.
- Cooking timePeeled chestnuts in boiling salted water need 20 to 30 minutes. They should crush without resistance — undercooked chestnuts stay mealy and no amount of beating will smooth them.
- Scalded milkScalding milk was routine practice in this period, partly as a safeguard with unpasteurized milk; whatever the original reason, hot milk still matters, since cold liquid stiffens a starchy purée. Warm 1/2 to 3/4 cup and add it gradually until the purée just holds a shape.
- Riced, not blendedThe text calls for ricing, and a ricer or food mill is the right tool. A food processor can work chestnut starch into a pasty, gluey texture, much as it does with potato.
- Worth addingTwo or three tablespoons of butter beaten in at the end, and a little of the meat's pan juices, are common modern additions, though Farmer calls for neither. Chestnut purée is traditionally served with turkey, goose, venison and braised beef.
Chestnuts appear under Vegetables rather than Desserts here because that is how Europe has long tended to treat them: a starch, closer to a potato than to a walnut, and for centuries the bread grain of mountain districts in Tuscany, Corsica and the Limousin. Farmer's careful phrase "French and Italian chestnuts" is a mark of the American market of the 1890s, when the imported European nut was the large, sweet, easily peeled one, while the native American chestnut — then still an enormous presence in eastern forests — gave small, intensely sweet nuts in threes. That native tree was effectively destroyed by chestnut blight, first identified in New York in 1904, so the nut a modern cook is likely to find is the European one rather than the native, though Asian chestnuts and hybrids are also sold. Purée and the practice of piling riced chestnuts in the centre of a platter of meat both come out of French service.