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Chestnut Cream
Remove the dark skins from about twenty chestnuts, parboil them, and rub the light skins off, then pound them in a mortar, and pass them through a sieve. Dilute one and a half ounces of gelatine in half a pint of milk, blanch and bruise six sweet almonds, and add with the thin rind of half a lemon and a small quantity of sugar; put these into a stewpan, and, when the milk is boiling, move to one side until it cools, then strain it, and stir in with the chestnut mixture. When it is worked smooth add one wineglassful of dry curacoa and one-half pint of whipped cream; pour it into a mould and place it on ice. Whip some more cream and sugar to a froth, and when the chestnut cream is set, turn it out, and pour the whipped cream around.
A moulded gelatin cream of the sort every hotel kitchen turned out in the 1890s. The one thing to get right is the gelatine, since the figure given will set like a rubber ball if you read it as modern powder.
- The gelatine is the hingeOne and a half ounces of gelatine to the little over a pint of liquid here (half a pint of milk, half a pint of cream, a wineglass of curacoa) is far beyond modern practice; today's powdered gelatin is about 225 bloom and a quarter-ounce envelope sets two cups. Nineteenth-century gelatine was generally weaker and less consistent from brand to brand, so treat the amount as unreliable rather than authoritative and scale to the strength of what you actually have.
- ChestnutsTwenty chestnuts in the shell will run somewhere around three-quarters of a pound to a pound depending on size, yielding roughly 10-13 oz of peeled nut. Score the flat side, boil briefly as the recipe directs (or roast), and peel while hot -- the inner pellicle clings once it cools. A food mill or ricer does the mortar-and-sieve work in a minute.
- Sweet almondsSimply ordinary almonds, named to distinguish them from bitter almonds, which were then sold for flavouring and are not safe to eat. Blanched and bruised means skinned and lightly crushed to release flavour into the milk; they are strained out.
- Stewpan and infusionA stewpan is a straight-sided saucepan. Bringing the milk to the boil with the almonds and lemon peel and then letting it cool off the heat is an infusion; give it 15-20 minutes before straining. Pare the peel thin, with no white pith.
- WineglassfulReckon a wineglass at about 2 fl oz. Dry curaçao is a bitter-orange liqueur; Grand Marnier or a good triple sec stands in, though both are sweeter, so hold back the sugar until you have tasted.
- "Place it on ice"The mould was set into ice to chill and set. The refrigerator does the job: 4-6 hours for a small mould, overnight for a quart. Dip the mould briefly in warm water and invert onto a chilled plate.
- Folding the creamLet the chestnut and gelatine base cool to barely warm before folding in the half pint of whipped cream, or the cream will slacken and the mixture will separate into layers in the mould.
- YieldAbout a quart of moulded cream, serving six to eight. The extra whipped cream poured around the turned-out mould is the whole presentation, so it should be sweetened lightly and whipped only to soft peaks.
Oscar Tschirky, the maitre d'hotel whose name carried the Waldorf's kitchen into print in 1896, compiled a book that reads as a survey of what a large American hotel was expected to serve, and moulded creams like this one were a fixture of that repertoire: a cold sweet that could be prepared hours ahead, unmoulded at the last moment, and made to look architectural. The technique is French, and the chestnut flavouring points the same way -- marrons were a European luxury import. Curacao, distilled from dried bitter orange peel -- often, though not always, from the laraha grown on the Dutch Caribbean island -- was among the most fashionable dessert liqueurs of the period.