Remove the shells from several dozen large chestnuts, then scald so to be able to peel off the red skins; put them into a buttered flat saucepan, salt and moisten to their height with good broth (No. 194a); boil the liquid and withdraw the saucepan to a slower fire to have the chestnuts cook while remaining whole. When tender the moisture should be entirely reduced; glaze with a brush before serving.
A straightforward braise: whole peeled chestnuts cooked slowly in stock until the liquid has reduced to a glaze. The hinge is heat control — chestnuts fall apart the moment they are stirred or boiled hard, and the dish depends on them staying whole.
Braised chestnuts in the French style — marrons au jus — were standard autumn and winter garnish work in the nineteenth-century professional kitchen, where the chestnut was treated as a vegetable rather than a sweet. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, filed this among his other vegetables alongside cepes and chicory, and the recipe assumes the reader has a pot of brown stock already going, which in a restaurant of that scale was a safe assumption. The distinction his French readers would have drawn is between the marron, the large single-kernelled nut prized for glacé work and garnishes, and the smaller ordinary châtaigne; his instruction to use "large chestnuts" is reaching for the same thing. Chestnuts were far cheaper and more common in American markets then than now: the blight that destroyed the American chestnut was not identified until 1904, a decade after The Epicurean appeared in 1894, and the nuts sold today are almost all European or Asian.