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Mont Blanc
1 pound large chestnuts (Ital- ½ teaspoon salt ian chestnuts are best for ¾ cup sugar this)
Whipped cream
Put the chestnuts into the oven for a moment, until the shell and inner skin can be easily removed. Boil the skinned chestnuts in water with the salt and three tablespoons of the sugar, until they are very tender. Add one-half cup sugar to the water and chestnuts and let stand until thoroughly cold. Remove chestnuts from this sirup and run them through a potato-ricer on to a platter, mounding it high. Save a few of the finest whole pieces to decorate the dish. Top it all with a spoonful of sweetened whipped cream, and put a border of whipped cream around the edge of the dish, dotting it with the whole nuts here and there.
A dessert that lives or dies on the texture of the mound: the riced chestnut must fall onto the platter in loose threads and be left alone. Pat it into shape and you have chestnut paste rather than Mont Blanc.
- Peeling the chestnutsCut an X through the shell on the flat side of each nut first, then give them 8-10 minutes in a 400F oven rather than "a moment" — the inner skin only slips off while the nuts are hot. Work through them in batches and keep the rest warm, since a cooled chestnut clings to its pellicle.
- Weight after peelingA pound of chestnuts in the shell yields roughly 12 ounces peeled, and a few always break up or turn out to be moldy. Buy about a pound and a quarter if you want intact nuts left over for the decoration.
- Boiling timeThe recipe gives none. Expect 25 to 40 minutes at a bare simmer, depending on size and age; they are done when a nut crushes with no resistance under the back of a spoon. Undercooked chestnuts will not go through a ricer.
- The syrup soakAdding the remaining half cup of sugar and cooling the nuts in that liquid is the sweetening and moistening step, not an afterthought. Give it a couple of hours, or refrigerate overnight; the nuts absorb syrup as they cool and drop from the ricer more cleanly.
- RicingA potato ricer, or a food mill, gives the vermicelli strands. Hold it high above the platter and move it around so the threads pile up on themselves. A food processor will not do this — it makes purée.
- Italian chestnutsThe preference is for the large, easily peeled cultivars sold as marroni. Vacuum-packed or jarred whole cooked chestnuts (unsweetened) are a legitimate shortcut: skip the oven and the boiling, warm them in the sugar syrup until tender, and cool them in it.
- Whipped creamSweeten lightly and whip only to soft peaks — stiff cream sits on the mound like a cap instead of settling into it. Assemble within an hour of serving, as the cream weeps and the chestnut threads dry at the surface.
- YieldServes four to six as written. Nothing sets this dessert; the mound holds its shape only by the friction of the strands, so serve it from the platter with a spoon.
Mont Blanc — Monte Bianco in Italian, mont-blanc aux marrons in French — takes its name from the snow-capped peak on the French-Italian border, the whipped cream standing for the snowfield and the riced chestnut for the mountain beneath. The dish belongs to the chestnut country on both sides of the Alps, where sweet chestnuts were a staple carbohydrate long before they were a luxury, and its modern plated form has been variously attributed — to seventeenth-century Italian monte bianco, to nineteenth-century French and Piedmontese pastry work, and to the Paris tearoom versions of the early twentieth century. Its appearance in an American household manual reflects how much Italian produce had entered the ordinary urban grocery by then: the recipe assumes the cook can ask for Italian chestnuts by preference and get them. Chestnuts were also still a familiar autumn item in the United States at the time of writing, though the blight that destroyed the American chestnut was already well advanced, which may be part of why imported nuts were the ones worth naming.