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Mont Blanc (Remove shells from three cups)
Remove shells from three cups French chestnuts, cook in small quantity of boiling water until soft, when there will be no water remaining. Mash, sweeten to taste with powdered sugar, and moisten with hot milk; cook two minutes. Rub through strainer, cool, flavor with vanilla, Kirsch or Maraschino. Pile in form of pyramid, cover with Cream Sauce I, garnish base with Cream Sauce I forced through pastry bag and tube.
A plain chestnut purée piped or heaped into a cone and buried in whipped cream. The work is almost entirely in the chestnuts, and the texture depends on getting them dry and pressing them through a fine sieve.
- PeelingThe recipe says only "remove shells," but the thin brown inner skin has to come off too or the purée will be bitter and fibrous. Score each nut, boil or roast a few minutes, and peel while hot — they resist once cooled.
- QuantityThe three cups are measured before shelling, so the yield of nutmeat is appreciably less; three cups of chestnuts in the shell is roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb. Vacuum-packed or jarred cooked chestnuts can be substituted and skip the peeling entirely.
- "No water remaining"This is the hinge. Cook in barely enough water to cover and let it boil away so the purée is dry and stiff; a wet purée will not hold a pyramid and cannot be piped.
- Powdered sugarIn this period a finely ground sugar, not necessarily identical to modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch, though confectioners' sugar will serve and dissolves smoothly into the hot puree. The recipe says only 'sweeten to taste', so add gradually — French chestnuts are mildly sweet on their own.
- Cream Sauce IA cross-reference to the sweet cream sauce elsewhere in the book, essentially sweetened flavored whipped cream, not one of the savory white sauces of the same family. Check the book's own recipe rather than guessing; heavy cream whipped with a little powdered sugar and vanilla gives the same result.
- Sieving"Rub through strainer" means a fine sieve or a potato ricer. Pushed through a ricer directly onto the plate, the purée falls in vermicelli strands — the version most people now recognize as Mont Blanc.
- FlavoringA teaspoon of kirsch or maraschino is enough for this quantity; more and the liqueur loosens the purée as well as dominating it. Add it cold, after cooking, as directed.
- Yield and timingThe recipe states no yield; this quantity would plausibly serve about six. Assemble within an hour or two of serving — the puree dries and crusts on standing, and the whipped cream weeps.
Mont Blanc takes its name from the peak on the French-Italian border: a white dome over a brown mass, which is exactly what the dish looks like. It belongs to the shared Alpine kitchen of Savoy and Piedmont, where sweetened chestnut purée under cream is often said to be long established, and where the Italian name monte bianco is used for the same construction. Its appearance among the cold desserts in a Boston cooking-school book reflects the strongly French orientation of American genteel cookery around 1900, when chestnuts were an autumn import worth the trouble of peeling. The instruction to specify "French chestnuts" is a real distinction: the large sweet European nut, not the smaller native American chestnut then still common in the eastern woods and soon to be destroyed by blight.