No. 3012

Cream of Chestnuts with Caramel Sugar

Creme de Marrons au Caramel

Cook a pound of skinned chestnuts in water with a quarter of a vanilla bean, then rub them through a sieve into a vessel, and add six whole beaten eggs and four yolks, also half a pound of sugar; dilute with a pint of raw milk, mix well, and pass the whole through a sieve. Pour into the bottom of a plain timbale mold one gill of sugar cooked to caramel; when cold butter the sides of the mold, and fill it up with the chestnut preparation; set the mold into a saucepan with hot water to half its height, leave it on the fire, and just when it reaches the boiling point cover and keep it cooking slowly, or else place it in a slack oven to maintain the liquid at the same temperature without boiling for fifty to sixty minutes, or until the preparation is firm to the touch in the center. Invert the cream on a dish, and cover it with the caramel sugar found on the bottom of the mold.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A chestnut crème renversée: a stiff custard baked in a caramel-lined mold and turned out. The hinge is temperature — the water bath must never boil, or the custard curdles and weeps.

A gill of sugarA gill is half a cup, so roughly 3.5 oz / 100 g of sugar cooked to caramel. Poured hot into the mold it sets to a hard sheet; it dissolves into sauce as the custard cooks and rests.
Butter after the caramel coolsRanhofer gives the order plainly: pour the caramel, let it go cold, then butter the sides only. He does not say why; presumably so the fat does not run into the sugar, and so the custard releases at the sides.
"Raw milk"Here it means unscalded, unboiled milk rather than unpasteurized — the custard is not a cooked base. Ordinary whole milk is what is wanted; a pint is two cups.
A slack ovenA low oven, conventionally taken as somewhere around 250-300°F. Set the mold in a roasting pan with hot water to half the mold's height. The water should stay at a bare shiver, around 180°F, and never bubble.
Skinned chestnutsA pound of peeled chestnuts is what you want in the pot, not a pound in the shell. Vacuum-packed or jarred whole chestnuts work; simmer them soft with the vanilla bean before sieving, and expect to press them through a drum sieve or run them through a food mill — a blender leaves the purée gluey.
The egg ratioSix whole eggs and four yolks to a single pint of milk, plus a pound of chestnut purée, makes a dense, sliceable custard closer to a timbale than to a modern pot de crème. That richness is deliberate; it is what allows the thing to be unmolded standing up.
Judging donenessFifty to sixty minutes is a guide. Test the center: it should be firm to the touch with only the faintest tremor, about 175°F on a thermometer. Overshoot and the caramel sauce turns watery from released whey.
UnmoldingLet it settle ten to fifteen minutes out of the water so the caramel liquefies, then run a knife around the edge and invert onto a rimmed dish — there will be more sauce than a flat plate can hold.
YieldA quart-and-a-half timbale mold suits this quantity, serving eight to ten. Serve warm, as the section title indicates; this is a hot entremet, not a chilled flan.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) sets down the repertoire he cooked at Delmonico's in New York, and this is the standard French crème renversée au caramel turned toward autumn by the addition of chestnut purée. Marrons — the large, single-kernel cultivated chestnuts prized in France and northern Italy — were imported to America, though chestnuts of other sorts were plentiful in the United States at the time; they turn up in restaurant cooking as purées, stuffings, glacé confections and creams like this one. The pairing with vanilla and caramel is the classic French treatment, and the technique of cooking a custard in a caramel-lined mold and inverting it is documented in French cookery well before Ranhofer. The double sieving the recipe calls for — the chestnuts through a sieve, then the whole mixture through a sieve again — is characteristic of restaurant work.