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Preserved Chestnuts
Take the brown skins off some chestnuts and put them in boiling water until the light skins can be removed. Have some syrup ready, put the chestnuts in, stand by the fire and let simmer for several hours, every little while adding a little more syrup. The syrup should thicken while simmering, otherwise it would get mouldy. Heat the chestnuts two days in this manner, then take out and drain. Boil some syrup to the blow degree in a small pan, and when it is cool, work it until it has a gloss. Dip the chestnuts in this, drain on a wire-sieve and dry in a oven for two minutes.
This is marrons glacés under a plain English name, and it is a candying schedule rather than a recipe: the point of the two days is to let sugar move slowly into the nut without collapsing it. Read it as a sequence of soaks in progressively heavier syrup.
- The hinge: never boil the nutsThe hinge: never let the syrup boil hard -- a rolling boil turns candied chestnuts into gravel. The syrup should barely tremble the whole time; "stand by the fire" probably means the cooler edge of the range rather than over direct heat.
- "The blow degree"An old sugar-boiling stage named for the way syrup, blown through a skimmer's holes, forms bubbles. It sits around 230-235F on a thermometer, below the ball stages. The stages below it are thread (about 215F) and pearl (about 220F).
- Working the cooled syrupCooling blow-degree syrup and then agitating it until it turns opaque and glossy is the making of fondant. That white, workable mass is the glaze; if it is stirred while hot it grains coarsely and the coating goes sandy.
- Syrup strength, unstatedOscar never says what the starting syrup is. The method implies a light syrup to begin with, concentrated by each day's simmering and the syrup added along the way. The warning about mould is the tell: an under-concentrated syrup at the end will ferment or spoil in storage.
- Two skins, two operationsThe outer shell comes off raw or after a slit and a brief roast; the bitter inner pellicle is what the boiling water loosens. Work in small batches and peel while hot, since the pellicle grips again as the nut cools.
- Expect breakageUse the largest, roundest nuts and handle them with a slotted spoon rather than tongs. Commercial makers reckon on losing a substantial share to splitting, which is why the broken ones became the paste sold as crème de marrons.
- The two-minute ovenThis is only to set the fondant to a dry shell, not to cook anything; the recipe gives no temperature, so read it as a low oven. Longer and the glaze melts and slides off.
- Yield and keepingDepending on the size of the nuts, a pound of peeled chestnuts might give something on the order of two dozen finished pieces. Glazed and fully dried, they keep a few weeks in a tin between layers of paper; humidity is the enemy, as the fondant will weep.
Candied chestnuts belong to the mountain country of northern Italy and southeastern France — Piedmont, the Ardèche, the hills above Lyon — where the chestnut was a staple starch long before it was a luxury, and where the confection is generally traced to the courts of Savoy in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Sugar-preserving was the standard way to carry a short autumn harvest into winter, and the multi-day method here is the classic one: raising the sugar concentration a little at a time so the nut candies through instead of shrivelling. That Oscar Tschirky includes it in a hotel cookbook of the 1890s says something about the Waldorf's ambitions; marrons glacés were an imported, expensive item associated with Parisian confectioners.