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Chestnut Glace with Caramel
Select one quart of chestnuts, slit the skins with a knife, place them in a fryingpan on a slow fire, and roast them, but do not allow them to get brown, then remove the skins. When they are quite cold, stick a wooden peg or splint into each chestnut. Boil one pound of loaf sugar in a pint of water, and dip each chestnut into it. Try the sugar by dipping a skewer first into the sugar and then in cold water; if it comes off easily, it will not stick to the teeth. In a broad flat basin, put some brown sugar, and push the ends of the skewers into it, leaving the chestnuts uppermost to drain, and when they are cold, arrange them tastefully on a compote-dish.
A caramel-dipped chestnut, closer to a candy apple than to the syrup-candied marron glacé. Everything depends on the sugar reaching the hard-crack stage and staying dry.
- The hinge: sugar stageThe cold-water test described here is consistent with the hard-crack stage, roughly 300-310F on a thermometer, though the original gives no temperature and relies on the skewer test alone. Below that the coating stays tacky and welds itself to the teeth, which is exactly the failure the original warns against.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined cane sugar sold in a cone and broken up as needed. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute; one pound to one pint of water is about 2 1/4 cups sugar to 2 cups water.
- A quart of chestnutsMeasured by volume in the shell, roughly 1 1/2 lb, giving somewhere around 40 to 50 nuts. Buy more than you need, since a proportion will be dry, mouldy or shrivelled inside.
- Roasting and peelingSlitting the shell is essential or the nuts burst. The point of the pan-roasting is only to loosen shell and inner pelt, not to colour the nut; peel while still hot, as the papery inner skin sets tight the moment they cool.
- PeggingWooden cocktail picks or short bamboo skewers do the work of the "peg or splint." Insert them into cool, dry nuts and handle nothing with wet fingers; the recipe is explicit that the nuts must be quite cold before pegging.
- The brown sugar basinThe tray of brown sugar is a holder, not an ingredient: it grips the skewer ends so the nuts hang clear while the caramel sets. A block of florist's foam or a colander does the same job now.
- HumidityHard-crack sugar draws water from the air and turns sticky within a few hours in a damp kitchen. Dip on a dry day and serve the same evening; these do not keep.
- YieldEnough for a compote dish at the end of a large dinner, about eight to ten servings of four or five nuts each.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, put his name to this collection in 1896, and the sweets chapter reflects what a great New York hotel expected on the table after a long dinner: small handled confections eaten with the fingers alongside coffee. Chestnut sweets came into American hotel cookery through the French kitchen, where the celebrated version is the marron glacé of Lyon and the Ardèche, a nut poached slowly in successive syrups over days. This is the fast hotel cousin, a peeled roasted chestnut dipped in hard-crack sugar rather than candied through, and the name "glacé" here means the glassy coating rather than the long candying. Chestnuts were still cheap and abundant in the 1890s Northeast, before the chestnut blight arrived early in the next century and destroyed the American chestnut as a commercial crop; the nuts sold today are almost all European or Asian.