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Puree of Chestnuts
Take off the outer skins of some chestnuts, put in a pan of boiling water and boil for a few minutes with a little salt to season. Take them off, put into cold water and remove the skins. Put the chestnuts in a pan with a quart of broth, put on the fire until boiling, then move to the side and boil slowly until tender. When cooked rub the chestnuts through a wire sieve with a wooden spoon, then put them back with the remainder of the liquid to the saucepan, put in a teaspoonful of sugar and a small lump of butter, and boil them up again.
A two-stage chestnut purée: blanch and peel, simmer in broth, sieve, enrich. The original gives no chestnut quantity, so the ratio is yours to set.
- Quantity is unstatedOnly the broth is measured, at a quart. For a purée thick enough to hold a spoon, about 1.5 lb of chestnuts in the shell (roughly 1 lb peeled) to that quart is a sensible working ratio; less gives you a soup rather than a purée.
- The hinge: peel them hotScore an X through the shell of each nut before the first boil, and pull the inner brown pellicle off while the chestnuts are still warm. The recipe's cold-water dip is probably only intended to make them handleable; if they cool through, the skin bonds to the nut and peeling becomes slow, picking work.
- "Outer skins" means the shellThe first removal is the hard shell, the second is the bitter inner skin. Both must go. Any pellicle left behind shows as dark specks and tastes astringent in the finished purée.
- BrothUnspecified. A light veal or poultry stock is the likeliest reading for a kitchen of this kind. Use a low-salt stock, since the purée reduces and the chestnuts were already salted in the blanching water.
- Simmer, do not boil"Move to the side and boil slowly" describes a coal range, where the cool end of the top gave you a bare simmer. On a modern burner that is the lowest setting, 30 to 45 minutes, until a nut crushes with no resistance.
- The sieveA wooden spoon through a wire sieve is still the best texture, but a food mill with the fine plate does the same work in a fraction of the time. A blender or processor makes it gluey; chestnut starch does not like high shear.
- Sugar and butterA teaspoon of sugar in a quart is seasoning, not sweetening; it lifts the chestnut flavour. "A small lump of butter" is about 1 to 2 tablespoons. Add both off the heat if you want a glossier finish, and thin with reserved broth or a little cream.
- Yield and servingSince the recipe gives no chestnut quantity, yield depends on the ratio you choose; on the suggestion above expect several cups, enough for six as a garnish. It belongs beside roast turkey, venison or game birds, and it sets firm as it cools, so hold it warm over water and loosen with hot broth before it goes to the table.
Oscar Tschirky's book appeared in 1896, when the Waldorf's kitchen was working squarely in the French repertoire, and a puree de marrons was standard equipment there: the accompaniment to roast game, venison and holiday poultry, and the base of a soup when let down with more stock. The recipe names no origin for the chestnuts, and either would have been available: the large, easily peeled Italian and French marrons that arrived by ship each autumn, or the smaller native American chestnut, abundant in the eastern woods and heavily sold in eastern cities, though fiddlier to work with. Within a decade that native tree was in trouble: chestnut blight was identified at the New York Zoological Park in 1904 and had swept most of the range within forty years, which is why American chestnut pur uts is now a rarity rather than a matter of course. The technique itself is older than the hotel and unchanged since: blanch, peel twice, simmer in broth, sieve, and finish with sugar and butter to balance the nut's faint tannin.