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Chestnut Cakes
Put about twenty or thirty chestnuts on a gridiron over a clear fire, and cook until the skins can be easily removed. Skin them and put them into a mortar, with two or three ounces of butter and a little well-whipped cream, and pound well; then rub the mass through a fine sieve, using care to see that the mixture is not too wet. When all has been passed through, put it into a basin and mix in half its weight in sifted crushed loaf-sugar, slightly flavored with vanilla. Form the mixture into small cakes, placing them on a well-buttered baking-sheet, make a slight incision on the top of each, brush them over with the yolk of an egg, and bake to a good color in a hot oven. When done, remove them from the baking-sheet, and serve. Chous Crisped (Pralined) with Almonds.
Pour one breakfast cupful each of milk and water into a saucepan with two ounces of butter, and bring them to the boil; then remove the pan from the fire, and work in a sufficient quantity of flour to form a soft paste. Place the saucepan back on the fire, and mix until all the lumps are broken up and the paste is perfectly smooth, and let it dry over the fire for a few minutes; then mix in one ounce of butter and two or three eggs, and stir these well in, adding three ounces of crushed loaf sugar, a little salt, two tablespoonfuls of whipped cream, and one tablespoonful of orange-flower water. Work the paste into small cakes, decorate them with blanched and chopped almonds, brush over with egg, dust with powdered sugar, place them in a slow oven, and bake to a light color. Then serve at once. When mixing the paste, care must be had not to mix it too thick.
Two small confections run together in one paragraph: a chestnut paste cake and a sugared choux. Both depend on getting the moisture right, which is what the original keeps warning about.
- The hinge: keep the purée dryChestnut paste that carries too much cream will slump on the sheet and never take a crust. Add the whipped cream a spoonful at a time until the mass just holds together, and if it looks slack, dry it a few minutes in the pan before sieving.
- QuantitiesTwenty to thirty chestnuts in the shell is very roughly 3/4 to 1 1/2 lb, depending on the size of the nuts, yielding perhaps 9-12 oz of peeled nutmeat. The sugar is given as half the weight of the sieved paste, so weigh the purée before sweetening rather than guessing.
- Roasting the chestnutsA gridiron over a clear fire is a bed of coals. Score each nut on the flat side and roast at 425F for 20-25 minutes, or boil them 15-20 minutes; peel while hot, since both the shell and the inner pellicle cling once cool.
- Loaf sugarSugar then came as a hard cone that was broken and crushed at home. Superfine (caster) sugar is the direct substitute; for the dusting, use confectioners' sugar.
- Mortar and sieveA food processor does the pounding in seconds, but still pass the paste through a fine sieve or ricer afterward — the sieving is what removes the fibrous bits and gives the smooth texture.
- Oven temperaturesA "hot oven" for the chestnut cakes is 425-450F; they only need color, so 10-12 minutes. The "slow oven" for the chous is 300F, which is workable for a sugared, egg-washed surface that must stay pale, but choux rise better started near 400F and then dropped. Expect these to puff modestly at best.
- Breakfast cupfulUsually reckoned at about 8 to 10 fl oz, so the same as or a little larger than a modern measuring cup. Since the flour is added by eye "to form a soft paste," the imprecision does no harm; add flour until the dough pulls from the sides of the pan in a smooth ball.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, and still potent. One tablespoon in this quantity of paste is assertive by current taste; a teaspoon or two is closer to modern palates.
- Yield and servingNeither recipe gives a yield; expect roughly two dozen chestnut cakes the size of a walnut and a similar number of small chous. Both would suit the petits fours or dessert course, and both are best the day they are baked.
Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel rather than its chef, and the 1896 Cook Book he put his name to is essentially a compendium of the high French repertoire as an American luxury hotel practiced it. Both of these belong to the petits fours and dessert-course pastries a European-trained pastry kitchen turned out in quantity: sweetened chestnut purée pounded with butter and cream is the same preparation that underlies marrons and the Italian and Savoyard chestnut confections, where the nut long served as a staple starch before it became a delicacy. The instruction to crush loaf sugar has a period ring to it, though a single ingredient term can only suggest so much. "Chous crisped (pralined)" is simply choux paste finished with nuts and sugar so the surface caramelizes, a treatment usually traced to the same praline technique that gave its name to the almond confection.