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Pepper (Cook stock chestnuts onion)
Cook stock, chestnuts, onion, and celery salt ten minutes; rub through sieve, add milk, and bind. Season with salt and through sieve , add milk, and bind. Season with salt and pepper.
A purée-style chestnut soup in the terse house style of the period, where the ingredient quantities sat in a heading above the method. Work from proportions rather than the text as it stands.
- Working proportionsThe line gives no amounts. As a starting point, try roughly 3 cups white stock to about a pound of peeled chestnuts, a slice of onion and a cup of milk; that makes something on the order of four servings. These are the editor's proportions, not the book's.
- "Bind" means thickenMost likely with a butter-and-flour roux, the usual thickener for cream soups of this kind; the line itself gives no amounts, and note that the text adds the milk first and binds after. The chestnut purée alone will not hold the milk in suspension.
- ChestnutsThey must be shelled and skinned before they go in: score the flat side, roast or boil briefly, and peel while hot, since the inner pellicle sticks fast once cool. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts are a fair substitute and need no pre-cooking.
- Ten minutes is not enough for raw nutsThe short cooking time assumes chestnuts already softened. Raw peeled chestnuts generally need something like 20 to 40 minutes of simmering before they will pass through a sieve.
- Rub through a sieveA food mill or a blender followed by a fine strainer does the same work in a fraction of the time. Strain after puréeing regardless; chestnut skin fragments are gritty.
- Celery saltAn early convenience seasoning of ground celery seed and salt, still sold. It carries salt with it, so hold back on seasoning until the milk is in and the soup is tasted.
- FinishingAdd the milk off the boil and reheat gently. Hard boiling after the milk goes in risks scorching and dulls the chestnut flavour.
Chestnut soup belongs to the long European tradition of treating the chestnut as a starch rather than a nut, a bulk food in Italy, southern France and Corsica well before it became a garnish for holiday poultry. Its appearance among the purée soups in a Boston cooking-school text reflects the American chestnut's ordinariness at the turn of the twentieth century, when the tree still filled the eastern hardwood forests and nuts were sold by the bushel in city markets each autumn. The blight identified in New York in 1904 effectively erased that supply within a few decades, and chestnuts on American shelves today are overwhelmingly imported European or Asian varieties. The method itself — cook, sieve, bind with roux, finish with milk — follows the familiar cream-soup pattern of the period.