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Chestnut Stuffing for Turkey
Put a dozen or fifteen large chestnuts into a saucepan of water, and boil them until they are quite tender; then take off the shells and skins, put into a mortar and pound them. Put four ounces of shredded beef-suet into a basin, stir in one-half pound of breadcrumbs, season with salt and pepper to taste, and squeeze in a little lemon juice. Mix in a pound of chestnuts, and the stuffing will be ready for use.
A plain Edwardian bread-and-suet stuffing whose only luxury is the chestnut. The written quantities do not quite agree with each other, so read the note on weights before shopping.
- The chestnut quantity contradicts itselfTwelve to fifteen large chestnuts yield roughly 8 ounces peeled, not the pound called for at the end. Work from the pound: buy about 1 1/2 lb of chestnuts in the shell to net 1 lb of peeled meat, or use 1 lb of vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts and skip the boiling.
- PeelingScore an X through the shell of each nut before boiling, and shell them while still hot. Once they cool the inner brown pellicle welds itself to the nut and the job becomes miserable.
- Shredded beef-suetThis is raw kidney fat from beef, sold shredded in Britain and sometimes frozen or from a butcher elsewhere. Four ounces of shredded suet is close to a cup, loosely packed. Cold grated butter of the same weight gives a similar richness with a cleaner flavour, though a slightly less crumbly set.
- Half a pound of breadcrumbsEight ounces of dry crumbs is about 2 cups and will drink up a great deal of moisture; the same weight of fresh soft crumbs runs to 4 or 5 cups and gives a lighter result.
- Pound, do not pureeThe mortar leaves some nuts crushed and some in pieces, which is the point. A few pulses in a food processor is enough; run it to a paste and the stuffing turns pasty and dense.
- It is deliberately bareThere is no onion, no herb, no stock. A finely chopped onion sweated in butter, a little thyme or sage, and 1/2 cup of stock or a beaten egg to bind are all period-appropriate additions if you want a stuffing that holds together on the plate.
- Yield and cookingThis makes roughly 5 cups, enough for a 12 to 14 lb turkey. If you pack it into the bird, the centre of the stuffing must reach 165F, which usually means overcooking the breast; baking it in a buttered dish for 35 to 40 minutes at 350F, moistened with a ladle of pan juices, is the more reliable route.
The suet-and-breadcrumb base is English: forcemeats of that kind run straight back through nineteenth-century household manuals, where beef kidney fat was a common enricher. What is notable is what the recipe omits. No onion, no sage, no measured oven time, and no assumption that the cook needs to be told how large a saucepan should be -- the terseness of a recipe written for someone who already knew the work.