Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Chestnut Paste
Chestnut Paste
Boil some chestnuts in water until they are soft. Then peel, skin and rub through a sieve; pound, and to every three-quarters of a pound of pounded chestnuts add one-fourth of a pound of marmalade (cherry, orange, or any other sort that may be preferred), and one pound of sugar. When weighed, boil to the feather degree the requisite quantity of sugar; that is, the degree of heat at which if a skimmerful of sugar be taken up and shaken the sugar will emit large sparks which will adhere together on rising. When the sugar is at this degree, mix it thoroughly with the pounded chestnuts and marmalade, place in moulds, and bake.
A confectioner's paste rather than a spread: chestnut purée bound with jam and boiled sugar, moulded and dried in the oven until it sets firm, like a stiff fruit paste. The hinge is the sugar syrup, which the original describes by an old visual test rather than a number.
- The feather degreeOld tables put this somewhere around 232-240F (111-115C), though sources disagree and some place it a little higher, at or just above soft ball. Oscar's skimmer test — shaking the spoon so the syrup flies off in sparks that cling together — is a working confectioner's substitute for a thermometer; use the thermometer.
- Two lots of sugar, read carefullyThe proportions call for one pound of sugar to three-quarters of a pound of chestnut and a quarter-pound of marmalade, and then the instruction "boil to the feather degree the requisite quantity of sugar." The natural reading is that this is the same pound of sugar, boiled with just enough water to dissolve it before it goes into the purée.
- Peeling chestnutsScore the flat side of each nut before boiling and peel while still hot; both the shell and the inner pellicle come away together, and both are stubborn once cool. Work in small batches, keeping the rest in the hot water. Roughly 1 lb of chestnuts in the shell yields about 12 oz of peeled meat.
- Sieve, then poundA food processor or a potato ricer does the work of the sieve and mortar. The order in the original matters less than the result, which should be a smooth paste with no fibrous flecks.
- The ovenNo temperature is given, and the recipe says only "bake"; the purpose appears to be drying and setting rather than colouring. A slow oven — 275-300F — for 45 minutes to an hour should set the surface without browning it; the paste should firm as it cools.
- MouldsSmall metal or ceramic moulds, lightly oiled, or a shallow parchment-lined tin from which the slab can be cut into squares once cold. Silicone moulds work and release cleanly.
- Marmalade choiceA stiff, well-set preserve gives a firmer paste; a loose, wet jam will not. Cherry is Oscar's first suggestion, though he leaves the choice open.
- Yield and servingThe quantities given make about 2 lb of paste, enough for 40 to 50 small confections. Serve with coffee, or with cheese as you would quince paste; sealed and cool, it keeps for weeks.
Chestnut confectionery of this kind belongs to the French and Italian tradition that reaches the American hotel kitchen by way of the classically trained chef — the same tradition that gives us marrons glacés and the sieved chestnut purée sold as crème de marrons. The technique here is that of a fruit paste or pâte de fruits: a purée weighed against sugar, cooked, moulded and dried until it can be cut. The sugar terminology is worth noticing. Before the candy thermometer was standard equipment, confectioners worked by a ladder of named stages — thread, pearl, blow, feather, ball, crack, caramel — each identified by how the boiling syrup behaved on a skimmer or between wet fingers, and "feather" (the French plume) sat between blow and soft ball. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms rather than its stoves, compiled the 1896 book from the professional repertoire around him, which is why an entry like this reads as instructions from one trained hand to another and assumes the reader already knows what a skimmerful of sugar ought to look like.