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Chestnut Stuffing
Peel a sound, good-sized shallot, chop it up very fine, place it in a saucepan on a hot fire with one tablespoonful of butter and heat it for three minutes without browning; then add one-fourth pound of sausage-meat and cook for five minutes longer. Add ten finely-chopped mushrooms and a dozen well pounded cooked peeled chestnuts and stir all well together, seasoning with one pinch of salt, half a pinch of pepper, one-half saltspoonful of powdered thyme, and one teaspoonful of finely-chopped parsley. Let this come to a boil, add one-half ounce of sifted breadcrumbs and twenty-five or thirty whole cooked and shelled chestnuts, and mix all well together, being careful not to break the chestnuts. Allow it to cool and it is then ready for use.
A dense, meaty forcemeat rather than a bread stuffing — the crumbs are barely more than a binder. The whole chestnuts are the point, so everything else is built around not crushing them.
- Chestnuts, cooked and peeledThe recipe assumes you begin with chestnuts already boiled or roasted and stripped of both shell and inner skin. Score fresh ones, roast at 425F for 15-20 minutes and peel while hot, or use vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts, which are close to what this asks for.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is generally taken as a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoonful of powdered thyme is about an eighth of a teaspoon. A "pinch" is an imprecise measure; season to taste at the end instead.
- Half an ounce of breadcrumbsThat is roughly 2 tablespoons of dry sifted crumbs — a very small amount by modern stuffing standards. Resist adding more; the mixture is meant to be chestnut held loosely together, not bread.
- Sausage-meatBulk pork sausage, uncased and unseasoned or lightly seasoned. Five minutes over heat may not cook it through, so treat it as raw: the stuffing goes into a bird and cooks further.
- Cook the stuffing to temperatureBecause the pork leaves the pan short of done, any bird stuffed with this must reach 165F at the center of the stuffing, not just in the thigh. Alternatively bake the stuffing separately in a dish for 30-40 minutes at 350F.
- "Let it come to a boil"There is almost no liquid here, so this means bring the mixture up to a full sizzle rather than a rolling boil. Fold the whole chestnuts in off the heat, with a spatula, so they stay intact.
- MushroomsTen mushrooms, presumably small cultivated caps — call it 4 to 5 ounces. Cook them until their water has driven off, or the stuffing will be wet.
- YieldRoughly 3 cups, enough for a chicken or capon; scale up for a turkey.
Chestnut stuffing came to American hotel kitchens from the French repertoire, where farce aux marrons — chestnuts, pork forcemeat, mushrooms — was standard for turkey, capon and goose, and Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf kitchen is often said to have worked in that idiom. The recipe is a period snapshot in one respect: it was written when chestnuts were still an everyday autumn commodity in the eastern United States. The blight that destroyed the American chestnut was identified in New York in the first years of the twentieth century and had swept most of the native range within a few decades, after which the nuts in American kitchens came largely from Italy and, later, from cultivated European and Asian trees. The distinction between pounded chestnuts as binder and whole chestnuts left intact is a professional touch — it gives the stuffing both body and texture from a single ingredient.