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Compote of Chestnuts
Take the brown skins off about fifty chestnuts and put in boiling water till the inner skin comes off easily; then put in a copper sugar-boiler, laying them flat on the bottom, cover with a syrup at 160 degrees Fahr. and let simmer for thirty minutes. When done, strain the syrup and reduce to 30 degrees Fahr.; before doing so, flavor with the rind of an orange. Put the chestnuts in a dish and strain the syrup over them.
A short professional note rather than a written-out recipe: Oscar assumes a pastry cook who already owns a syrup hydrometer and knows how to peel chestnuts. Two of the numbers as printed cannot be temperatures at all, so read them as syrup densities.
- The degree readings are not FahrenheitThe degree readings are hard to take as Fahrenheit -- 160 degrees Fahr. is hot but well short of any sugar-boiling stage, and a syrup cannot be "reduced" to 30 degrees Fahr., which is below freezing. They may be hydrometer readings from a confectioner's saccharometer, though the numbers run downward rather than upward as a reduction would, so the figures may simply be corrupt as printed. In practice the chestnuts want a light syrup, which is then boiled down to something appreciably thicker after the fruit comes out.
- Order of operationsThe sentence mentions the reduction first and the orange rind second, but the recipe itself says "before doing so": put the rind in, then reduce, so the oils infuse while the syrup boils down. Strip the zest in wide pieces with no pith and fish them out before serving.
- Peeling fifty chestnutsFifty average chestnuts is about 1 1/2 lb in the shell. Score an X in the flat side, boil or roast briefly, and work on a few at a time -- the thin inner pellicle only slips off while the nuts are hot, which is exactly what the boiling water in the original is for.
- The copper sugar-boilerAn unlined copper pan was standard for sugar work because it heats evenly and takes no harm from a neutral syrup. A heavy stainless saucepan does the same job here; the pan matters less than its width, since the nuts should sit flat in one layer as directed.
- Handle them onceSimmered chestnuts fall apart if stirred. Move the pan rather than the spoon, keep the syrup at a bare tremble for the thirty minutes, and lift the nuts out with a slotted spoon.
- DonenessThirty minutes suits fresh chestnuts; vacuum-packed or jarred cooked chestnuts are already tender and want no more than ten minutes in the syrup, or they will collapse into puree.
- Yield and servingEnough for six to eight as a dessert compote, served cool with cream, or as a garnish for roast game and poultry. It keeps several days refrigerated in its syrup.
Oscar Tschirky's book gathers the working notes of the Waldorf's kitchens in the years around 1896, and this entry belongs to the French confectionery side of that operation: compote de marrons, the plain cousin of the candied marrons glacés that were a luxury import from the chestnut country around Lyon and Turin. The technique -- peel, blanch off the inner pellicle, poach flat in a graded sugar syrup, then reduce the syrup over the fruit -- is straight out of the nineteenth-century French pastry tradition, where syrups were specified by hydrometer degree rather than by cup measure because a confectioner worked by density the way a modern cook works by temperature. Chestnuts were a much more ordinary autumn ingredient in American cities of the 1890s than they are now, sold roasted on the street and used freely in stuffings and sweets, which is why a hotel chef could set down a recipe for fifty of them without further comment.