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Cream of Chestnut
Shell and blanch two pounds of chestnuts. Cook them in one quart of water for one-half hour, adding one teaspoon of salt. Drain, place the chestnuts in two quarts of clear beef stock; add one teaspoon of celery salt, one tablespoon of chopped onion, one teaspoon each of pepper and chopped parsley, and cook until the chestnuts are soft-probably ten or fifteen minutes. Add one teaspoon of grated lemon rind and pulp pressed through a purée sieve. Return to the fire, add one teaspoon of lemon juice, two teaspoons of salt and one pint of rich cream or milk, with one tablespoon of butter.
A large, old-fashioned meat-stock purée rather than a delicate cream soup. Two points govern the result: the chestnuts must be genuinely soft before they go through the sieve, and the soup must not boil once the cream is in.
- Chestnut quantity and prepTwo pounds in the shell yields roughly 1 1/2 lb of peeled nutmeat. Vacuum-packed or jarred peeled chestnuts are a reasonable substitute at about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb, and skip straight to the stock stage. If shelling fresh, score each flat side, boil or roast briefly, and peel while hot — the inner brown pellicle is much harder to get off once cool.
- The timing is optimisticHalf an hour in salted water plus ten or fifteen minutes in stock will not reliably soften every chestnut, and hard fragments will not pass a sieve. Cook until a nut crushes to paste under a spoon with no resistance, which may be 45 minutes to an hour of total simmering.
- "Purée sieve"A conical sieve or food mill. A blender or immersion blender does the job faster; pass the result through a fine strainer afterward if you want the texture the original intends.
- The sentence about lemon rindAs printed it is ambiguous — the rind and the pulp are not the same thing. Read it as: purée the chestnuts and stock through the sieve, then stir the teaspoon of grated rind into the purée. The juice goes in afterward; keep it off a hard boil so the flavor stays bright.
- SaltThree teaspoons of salt in total (one in the blanching water, which is drained off, two at the end), plus a teaspoon of celery salt, written for unsalted homemade beef stock. With commercial broth, add none at the start and season only at the end.
- Cream stageAdd the pint of cream or milk and the tablespoon of butter over low heat and bring it only to steaming. Boiling after the dairy goes in risks curdling, the more so with the lemon juice in.
- YieldTwo quarts of stock plus a pint of cream makes roughly three quarts of finished soup — twelve first-course servings. Halve everything for a household batch.
The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern-and-magazine house of Butterick, and its soup chapter reflects the era's fondness for thick pur han the lighter vegetable creams that came later. Chestnut soup itself is older and largely European chestnut flour and boiled chestnuts were staple food across upland Italy, France and Iberia long before they were a garnish and it reached American tables mainly as an autumn and holiday dish, alongside chestnut stuffing and chestnut-and-Brussels-sprout garnishes. The recipe is also a small marker in time: the chestnut blight was identified in New York in 1904 and had spread widely within a few decades, so a cook in 1911 could still buy native American chestnuts by the pound, alongside the European imports that already made up a substantial part of the market. Today's shelled chestnuts are almost all imported European or Asian varieties.