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Chestnut Roulettes
One cup cooked chestnut pulp, yolks of two eggs slightly beaten, two tablespoons cream, one tablespoon sugar, one tablespoon cider, a little salt. After the mixture is cold, put in the stiffly beaten whites of the eggs. Mold into small balls, dip in egg and crumbs and fry in deep fat.
A garnish rather than a dish in its own right — small fried chestnut croquettes meant to be set around roast game or poultry, which is why the Butterick book files them near its sauces. The mixture is soft and only firms up when thoroughly chilled, so that step is the whole recipe.
- Chill before shapingThe instruction to wait until the mixture is cold is not optional. Warm chestnut purée with egg yolk in it will not hold a ball, and it will collapse in the fat. Refrigerate at least two hours, and chill the shaped balls again before breading.
- Chestnut pulpOne cup of pulp takes roughly 3/4 lb of chestnuts in the shell: score, boil or roast, peel while hot (both the shell and the inner skin), then simmer soft and press through a sieve. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts or unsweetened chestnut purée are direct substitutes; sweetened crème de marrons is not.
- CiderIn an American book of this period "cider" normally means sweet cider, plain unfermented apple juice. One tablespoon is there for tartness, not lift; hard cider would do the same job.
- Fry temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature; cooks of this period commonly judged deep fat by dropping in a cube of bread and watching how quickly it browned. Around 375F is a reasonable modern equivalent. Below that the crumb coat absorbs fat; above it the coating colours before the centre heats through.
- BreadingDip in beaten whole egg, not more white, and use fine dry crumbs. A second coat of egg and crumbs is worth the trouble on a soft mixture like this — the shell is the only thing holding the ball together.
- Folding the whitesThe whites lighten the interior but also loosen it. Fold in gently and only until no streaks remain; overworking them gives you a batter that will not mold.
- Yield and servingRoughly 16 to 20 balls about an inch across, enough to ring a roast for six. Drain on paper and serve at once; they soften quickly.
Chestnuts were a standard autumn accompaniment to game and poultry in turn-of-the-century American cooking, appearing boiled and buttered, in stuffing, in pur eam shaped and fried like this. "Roulette" is being used loosely here for a small rolled or molded shape, part of the French-inflected vocabulary that American cookbooks of the period applied freely to anything formed into a ball or cylinder. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, aimed its cook book at a middle-class housekeeper without a large staff who nonetheless wanted her roast to arrive garnished. Fresh chestnuts were still widely available in the eastern United States at this date, though the chestnut blight was already established in the New York area by the early 1900s and over the following decades effectively destroyed the American chestnut as a nut crop, leaving the market to imported Italian and Spanish nuts.