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Boiled Chestnuts
Wash thoroughly two or three pounds of chestnuts, make two cuts through the stem end of the shells, crossing each other so that the shells can be easily stripped off; tie the nuts in a napkin and boil in salted water until tender. Take them up, turn them into a fresh napkin laid in a salad-bowl and serve hot with fresh butter and salt. Claret wine should go with them.
A simple side or savoury course that lives or dies on the scoring and on peeling the nuts while they are still hot.
- Choose the nutsEuropean sweet chestnuts (Castanea sativa) or the cultivated hybrids sold in autumn markets, not horse chestnuts, which are inedible. Look for glossy, heavy shells with no rattle inside; a light nut has dried out or is worm-eaten.
- Score deeplyThe crossed cuts should go through the leathery inner skin, not just the shiny shell; a shallow cut leaves the pellicle welded to the nut and makes peeling much harder.
- The napkinA clean linen or cotton cloth tied into a loose bundle keeps the nuts together and lets you lift them out in one motion. A muslin jelly bag or a large square of cheesecloth does the same job; leave slack so water circulates.
- TimingThe original gives none. Figure 20 to 30 minutes at a steady boil for large nuts, 15 to 20 for small; they are done when a nut crushes easily against the roof of the mouth rather than merely yielding to a knife point.
- Peel hotShell and pellicle come away most cleanly while the chestnuts are steaming and cling stubbornly once cooled; the recipe's fresh cloth and hot service would let them be peeled at table.
- Salt the waterThe recipe calls for salted water. Chestnuts are bland and starchy and absorb very little seasoning after cooking, which is why butter and more salt arrive at the table.
- YieldTwo to three pounds in the shell serves six to eight as a course after dinner, rather less if they are being eaten as a snack with wine.
Boiled chestnuts were often eaten at the end of the meal rather than the middle in the European tradition Oscar Tschirky drew on: in Italy, France and Spain the autumn chestnut, boiled or roasted, is eaten out of hand, frequently with new wine, and the claret suggested here may be a dining-room version of that habit. Chestnuts were more ordinary food in 1896 than they are now; the American chestnut still stood in eastern forests and imported Italian nuts were sold from street braziers in New York in winter. The blight, first noticed in New York early in the twentieth century, effectively ended the American crop, so a dish that once cost almost nothing now depends on imported or cultivated hybrid nuts. Oscar does nothing to the nuts beyond boiling and salting.