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Sugared Chestnuts
Roast some chestnuts and peel off the skins. Have some reeds cut into pieces some three inches long, and put a chestnut on the point of each of these. Take a piece of butter about the size of a nut and rub with the hand on a piece of marble, and be sure to rub the butter all over it. Boil some sugar to caramel, and when it is at this degree take a wood splint, with a chestnut on the end of it, and dip them in the caramel. When all the chestnuts are done and are cold, take out the bits of osier, and wrap each chestnut in paper.
A confectioner's trick written for a professional kitchen: whole roasted chestnuts glazed in clear caramel, skewered so the hands never touch the sugar. The only difficult part is the sugar, and the difficulty is timing.
- The hinge: the caramel"Boil some sugar to caramel" means taking a plain syrup past hard crack (300-310F) until it colours, around 340-350F on a candy thermometer. Pull it from the heat the moment it is pale amber, because it keeps darkening in the pan and turns bitter within seconds.
- Reeds and osierOsier is willow withy, the same material used for basketry, cut here into three-inch dipping skewers. Bamboo skewers, cocktail picks or toothpicks do the same job; the point is a handle you can twist out cleanly once the glaze has set.
- The buttered marbleThe butter is not an ingredient, it is a release agent for the slab the dipped chestnuts are set down on. Rub it thin and even over cold marble, or use a silicone mat or parchment instead and skip the butter.
- Roasting and peelingScore each chestnut with an X through the shell before roasting or it may burst. Peel while still hot -- the inner pellicle comes away with the shell then and clings stubbornly once cool.
- QuantitiesThe recipe gives none. A pound of chestnuts, however many that comes to depending on size, is comfortably glazed by 2 cups of sugar boiled with about half a cup of water; there will be caramel left over, which is normal, as a shallow pool is impossible to dip in.
- HumidityCaramel is hygroscopic. On a damp day the glaze will go tacky within an hour or two, which may well be why the original wraps each chestnut in paper. Twists of waxed paper keep them crisp for a day or so at room temperature; refrigeration ruins them.
- ServingThese belong with coffee at the end of dinner, a few per person, alongside other petits fours rather than as a dessert in themselves.
Oscar Tschirky's book records the working repertoire of the Waldorf at a moment when the American hotel kitchen was still essentially French, and sugared chestnuts sit in a long European tradition of candying the nut: the marron glacé, generally traced to Piedmont and the Ardèche, where large-fruited cultivated chestnuts were syruped and dried over several days. This version is the quicker cousin -- no long candying, just a roasted nut jacketed in caramel, of the sort a garde-manger could turn out in an afternoon for the friandise tray. Worth noting what has changed underneath the recipe: American chestnuts were still a common sight in eastern markets in the 1890s, though confectioners also drew on large imported Italian nuts, and the blight spread through the American chestnut in the first decades of the twentieth century. Chestnuts sold today are almost all European, Japanese or hybrid, generally larger and sweeter, and easier to peel whole.