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Chestnut Sauce
Chestnuts are very popular with the French, who use them in stuffing or in sauce for roast turkey. French chestnuts are twice as large as the American variety and are sold by many grocers and fruiterers. One pint of shelled nuts; one quart of stock; one-half a lemon peel; one tablespoon of flour; two tablespoons of butter; one cup of cream or milk; salt and pepper. Remove the outer shells from the nuts, and scald the kernels until the inner skins can be easily taken off. Place the kernels in a stewpan with the stock, the lemon peel and a little salt and pepper, and simmer gently until the kernels are quite soft. Remove the lemon peel, rub the nuts through a sieve, mash them very fine, and return them to the stock. Put the butter in a frying-pan, and when it is hot, add the flour. Cook until darkbrown, add the stock and nuts, and cook for two minutes; then add the cream, boil up once, and serve.
A brown-roux sauce thickened mostly by the chestnuts themselves, meant for roast turkey or game. Nothing here is difficult, but the peeling and the roux both reward attention.
- A pint of shelled nutsThat is a volume measure of peeled kernels, very roughly three-quarters of a pound, so somewhere around a pound to a pound and a quarter of chestnuts in the shell. Two 14 oz jars or vacuum packs of peeled cooked chestnuts substitute cleanly and save the worst of the work.
- The chestnuts have changedThe "American variety" the book contrasts with the French one was Castanea dentata, effectively wiped out as a nut crop by chestnut blight in the first half of the twentieth century. What you buy now is Italian, Spanish, Turkish or Chinese-hybrid, already the large sweet type the recipe prefers.
- PeelingScore an X in the flat side of each nut before scalding; the inner pellicle comes away only while the nut is hot, so work through them in small batches and keep the rest in the hot water. Any pellicle left behind stays bitter and fibrous no matter how long you simmer.
- Lemon peelPare the zest thin with no white pith attached. It is there to cut the sweetness of the nuts and should be lifted out before sieving, as the recipe says.
- The roux is the hingeCooking butter and flour to dark brown is a matter of a few minutes over moderate heat and it goes from nut-brown to burnt quickly. Add the stock off the heat and whisk it in; a scorched roux will taint the whole quart.
- SievingA blender or food processor does in seconds what the original does with a sieve and a spoon. Loosen the cooked nuts with a ladle of their stock first, then thin to the consistency you want.
- Cream at the end"Boil up once" means exactly that. Bring it back to a bare boil, taste for salt and pepper, and take it off; held at a boil with the cream in, it scorches on the bottom and thins as the starch breaks down.
- YieldA quart or more of finished sauce, depending on how far the stock reduces in the simmering; enough for eight to ten servings alongside a roast bird. It thickens as it cools and will need loosening with stock or milk if made ahead.
Chestnuts were the winter starch of the poorer uplands of France, Italy and Spain long before they became a garnish for holiday poultry, and French cookery kept them in both roles: marrons in the stuffing, a chestnut purée or sauce beside the bird. Butterick's note that French chestnuts are "twice as large as the American variety" is a real distinction of its day — the native American chestnut bore small, very sweet nuts, and the big cultivated European marron was imported for the table. Within a generation of this book the point was moot: blight, first noticed in New York in the early 1900s, destroyed the American chestnut as a commercial nut. The dark-brown roux and the finish of cream mark the sauce as belonging to the Anglo-American reading of French practice that domestic-science cookbooks of the period were busy translating for households with a single cook and no saucier.