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Chestnut Souffles
After slitting the skins of about three dozen large chestnuts, roast them, but do not allow them to brown, then peel, pound in a mortar, and rub through a sieve. Put the mixture back into the mortar with half its weight in sugar added, a part of which has been flavored with vanilla, and add the white of an egg, mix all thoroughly together, and then shape the paste into small balls. Dip each ball into the whisked white of an egg, allow them to drain, and then roll them one at a time in powdered sugar until they are entirely covered with it; arrange them on a baking sheet a little distance from each other, and bake them for twenty-five or thirty minutes in a moderate oven. When done, put them in a group on a folded napkin.
These are not soufflés in the modern sense but small baked chestnut-paste confections, closer to an Italian castagnaccio ball or a French chestnut macaroon. The whole recipe hinges on getting the chestnuts cooked through but pale, since browning them makes the paste dry and hard to sieve.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no figure; "a moderate oven" is usually taken as somewhere around 350F. The balls should set and crack slightly rather than color; if the sugar coating begins to brown at the edges within ten minutes, the oven is too hot.
- Quantity of chestnutsThree dozen large chestnuts is roughly 1 1/2 lb in the shell; the peeled yield varies with the nuts but will be appreciably more than half that weight. Vacuum-packed peeled cooked chestnuts work and save the worst of the labor, and can be used in place of the roasting.
- Peel while hotSlit the shells on the flat side and roast only until the shells open, keeping the heat low enough that the nuts do not brown as the recipe directs, then peel while still hot, working a few at a time under a towel. Both the shell and the inner brown pellicle come away more easily from a hot nut than a cool one.
- Half its weight in sugarWeigh the sieved chestnut purée and add half that weight in sugar: 12 oz of purée to 6 oz of sugar, for example.
- Vanilla sugar"A part of which has been flavored with vanilla" means sugar stored with a split vanilla bean. A teaspoon of vanilla extract stirred into the paste gives the same effect, or split a bean into the sugar a few days ahead.
- Mortar and sieveA food processor will do the pounding, but still press the purée through a fine sieve or a potato ricer afterward; sieving catches the fibrous bits a blade tends to chop rather than break down.
- Two egg whites, two jobsOne white goes into the paste as a binder, unwhisked. A second, whisked to soft foam, is the dip that makes the powdered sugar adhere. Do not combine them.
- Yield and servingExpect roughly 20 to 24 balls of about walnut size. The folded napkin is period presentation for such items. They are best the day they are made.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, published his Cook Book in 1896, and its dessert chapters lean heavily on the French repertoire. Sweetened chestnut paste was central to that repertoire: the same purée underlies marrons glacés, chestnut vermicelli and the Mont Blanc, and European chestnuts were a familiar autumn import in American cities long before the blight of the early twentieth century destroyed the native American chestnut and made the nut a specialty item. The use of "soufflé" here is looser than the modern sense, which attaches the word to the custard-and-whipped-white construction. That the recipe assumes a mortar, a sieve and thirty-six hand-peeled chestnuts is a fair measure of how much labor a hotel brigade had at its disposal.