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Chestnut Pudding
Boil and peel about fifty or sixty fine chestnuts, and when well-cooked, pound or crush them fine; add the minced rind of half a lemon, one-fourth of a pound of powdered sugar, a dessertspoonful of orange flower or rose water, a breakfast cupful each of breadcrumbs and sweet biscuit in crumbs, and a teacupful of rich cream; then mix in with half a dozen eggs well-beaten up, yolks and whites together. Put the whole into a buttered mould, sprinkle it with sugar and set it for a moment under a glowing salamander.
A rich chestnut pudding written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen, where the cook was assumed to know what to do with a filled mould. Read the points below before you start, because the most important step is the one the text leaves out.
- The missing stepAs printed, the mixture goes straight from the bowl to a moment under the salamander, which would only colour the top of a raw batter. Six eggs and a cup of cream need real cooking: set the buttered mould in a water bath at 325F for 45-60 minutes, or steam it covered, until the centre reaches about 175F and a knife comes out clean. The sugar and the salamander are the finish, not the cooking.
- SalamanderA long-handled iron plate heated red in the fire and held over a dish to glaze it. A broiler set high, or a kitchen torch, does the same job in the same few seconds.
- Fifty or sixty chestnutsRoughly 2 lb in the shell, giving about 1 1/2 lb of peeled nutmeat, or around 2 cups when crushed. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts or unsweetened chestnut puree substitute directly and save a long session of peeling; if using sweetened puree, cut the sugar sharply.
- Old measuresA dessertspoonful is 2 teaspoons. A breakfast cupful is generous, about 1 to 1 1/4 cups; a teacupful is smaller, about 3/4 cup. A quarter pound of powdered sugar -- in this period, finely ground granulated sugar -- is about 1/2 cup; if you substitute modern confectioners' sugar, 4 oz is closer to 1 cup, sifted.
- Sweet biscuit in crumbsPlain sweet tea biscuits, shortbread or ladyfingers, crushed fine. Modern graham crackers or digestives work; skip anything with strong spice, which fights the orange flower water.
- Flower watersOrange flower and rose water are both still sold, and strengths vary considerably from bottle to bottle. Start with a teaspoon, taste, and add more only if it is faint.
- Yield and servingEnough for 8. Serve warm, unmoulded or in the dish, with lightly whipped cream or a thin custard sauce; chestnut is dry on the palate and wants something loose alongside.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maitre d'hotel who became the public face of the Waldorf, published his Cook Book in 1896 as a compendium of what a great American hotel kitchen actually made, and its pudding chapter belongs squarely to the Anglo-French repertoire of the period: eggs, cream, crumbs and a flavouring, bound in a mould and glazed. Chestnuts were then a common autumn ingredient rather than a delicacy, cheap enough to roast on street corners, and the American chestnut was still standing in quantity in eastern forests before the blight of the early twentieth century largely erased it. The orange flower or rose water is the older taste in the recipe, a holdover from eighteenth-century English and French confectionery that vanilla was steadily displacing, and the salamander a reminder that a hotel range carried tools no domestic cook owned.</invoke>