Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Olives Stuffed with Chestnuts
Olives Stuffed with Chestnuts
Take twelve Spanish olives and six Spanish chestnuts, put two ounces of butter in a saucepan with two ounces of ham cut in small pieces, a small carrot and onion peeled and cut into thin slices and fry until they are brown; then add a bay-leaf, a blade of mace, four peppercorns, dredge in one tablespoonful of flour and moisten with some of the liquor from the olives. Stir the whole until they are mixed then place the pan over the fire and stir occasionally. Boil the chestnuts and when they are tender peel and put them in a mortar with one pound of butter, salt and pepper to taste, and a small quantity of grated nutmeg, pound until smooth. Peel the olives, remove the stones, fill the hollows with the chestnuts, and lay them in a lined stewpan; strain the above sauce over them and let them simmer at the side of the fire until they are hot through. Cut a thick slice of bread, fry it in butter until it is nicely browned, then drain and scoop out the center, making a hollow large enough to hold the olives. When it is ready put the olives on the bread, place it on a hot dish, garnish tastefully round with quarters of hard-boiled eggs, pour the sauce round the bread and serve while it is very hot.
A small savoury from the Waldorf's repertoire: a brown mirepoix sauce, chestnut-butter stuffing, and a fried bread croustade. The proportions as printed need a hard look before you start.
- The pound of butter is wrongSix chestnuts pounded with a full pound of butter would give a soup, not a stuffing. Something between one and two ounces is what the quantity of chestnut will carry; the original figure is almost certainly a printer's slip and cannot be reproduced as written.
- "Peel the olives"Spanish olives are green olives packed in brine, and there is no skin to remove. What is meant is paring the flesh away from the stone in a spiral, or simply cutting out the stone with a small knife or a stoner, leaving a cavity to fill.
- ChestnutsSix fresh chestnuts yield about two ounces of peeled meat. Score the flat side, boil until tender, and peel while hot, or use jarred or vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts, which are the same thing without the labour.
- Blade of maceOne piece of the dried outer covering of nutmeg, roughly a third of a teaspoon of ground mace if you have no blades. It is strained out with the rest of the aromatics.
- SaltThe sauce is moistened with olive brine and includes ham, so it will already be salty. Season the chestnut butter lightly and taste the sauce only at the end.
- "At the side of the fire"A coal range had a cooler zone away from the firebox. On a modern hob this is the lowest possible heat: the olives are only being warmed through, three or four minutes, and a real boil will loosen the stuffing.
- Lined stewpanTin-lined copper in 1896, meaning simply a non-reactive pan. Stainless or enamelled will do; unlined aluminium or cast iron will dull a brine-based brown sauce.
- The croustadeCut the bread at least an inch thick from a firm loaf, fry in clarified butter or a butter-oil mix so it browns rather than scorches, then hollow it while warm. Fry it last so it is still crisp when the sauce goes round it, not over it.
- YieldTwelve olives on one round of bread is a single savoury course for two, or an hors d'oeuvre for four if you cut the croustade into quarters.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, published his cook book in 1896, and dishes like this one belong to the savoury course — a small, salty, highly seasoned plate served near the end of a long menu in the English fashion then followed by American luxury hotels. Spanish olives, imported in brine from Seville, were available on late-nineteenth-century American tables, and stuffing them (with anchovy, with pimiento, with capers, here with chestnut butter) was a way of making a few of them into a course. The construction is otherwise pure escoffier-era kitchen practice: a ham-and-mirepoix brown sauce thickened with a dredge of flour, strained, and used to nap a garnish set on a fried bread croustade, with hard-boiled egg quarters round the dish. The croustade served a practical purpose as well as a decorative one, absorbing the sauce and giving the diner something to cut.