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Devilled Chestnuts
Shell one cup chestnuts, cut in thin slices, and fry until well browned, using enough butter to prevent chestnuts from burning. Season with Tabasco Sauce or few grains paprika. Fruit Canapés Make German Toast in circular pieces, cover with stewed prunes, figs, or jam. Serve with Cream Sauce I.
Peach Canapés Sauté circular pieces of sponge cake in butter until delicately browned. Drain canned peaches, sprinkle with pow dered sugar, few drops lemon juice, and slight grating nutmeg. Melt one tablespoon butter, add peaches, and when heated, serve on cake. ½ lb. washed figs Chopped salted almonds
A chafing-dish savoury of three lines, printed here with the two canapé recipes that followed it on the page and a pair of orphaned ingredient lines that belong to neither. Treat only the first sentence as the chestnut recipe.
- Shelling is the whole job"Shell one cup chestnuts" hides ten minutes of work. The recipe gives no method; the usual approach is to score an X through the shell of each nut, cover with boiling water or roast in a hot oven (around 400-425F) for 15-20 minutes, then peel while hot -- both the outer shell and the bitter inner skin must come off, and both cling once the nuts cool.
- QuantityA cup of shelled chestnuts is roughly 5 oz, which starts as something over 6 oz in the shell. That is a small quantity, enough as a nibble alongside drinks rather than a course.
- Slice thin and evenlyChestnuts are starchy rather than oily, so thin slices brown and crisp at the edges while thick ones stay mealy in the middle. Aim for coins no more than 1/8 inch.
- "Enough butter to prevent burning"In practice 2 to 3 tablespoons for a cup of slices, added in stages over moderate heat. Chestnut starch scorches quickly and butter solids darken alongside it, so keep the pan moving; the recipe asks for "well browned," but stopping at golden is safer against scorching.
- The chafing dishThe pan -- The recipe says only "fry," with no equipment named. A heavy skillet over medium heat does the work; if you are using a chafing dish, brown the slices in a skillet first and hold them over the flame, where the heat is gentle and uneven.
- SeasoningTabasco or paprika goes on at the end, off the heat -- paprika turns acrid if it fries. Salt is not mentioned but is needed; chestnuts are bland without it.
- The stray lines"1/2 lb. washed figs" and "Chopped salted almonds" are orphaned ingredient lines that do not belong to any of the recipes printed here.
"Devilled" in this period meant nothing more than hot seasoning -- cayenne, mustard, or Tabasco -- applied to an otherwise plain food, and it was applied to almonds, biscuits, kidneys, crab and bones of cold meat with equal freedom. The chafing dish had its American vogue in the 1890s and 1900s, when it stood for informal late-evening hospitality in households without servants on duty, and the type is full of exactly this kind of thing: a single skillet, a few minutes, something to eat standing up. Chestnuts were a cheap autumn commodity in eastern American cities then, sold by street vendors and still gathered from native American chestnut trees, a tree effectively wiped out by a blight identified in 1904 -- the chestnuts sold today are almost all European or Asian species.