No. 3147

Chestnuts with Cream

Marrons a la Creme

Shell a few dozen sound chestnuts; scald them in order to remove the inner skin, then cook them very slowly in milk containing a piece of vanilla bean. When done all the liquid ought to be evaporated. Rub them through a sieve to make a puree. Put this puree into a saucepan with half its weight of sugar; work the paste on a slow fire until it becomes consistent and detaches from the saucepan; leave it till partly cold, then run a little of it at a time through a coarse sieve, pressing it down with a large spoon so that it falls like vermicelli; lift it up with a palette, dress it in a circle on the bottom of a dish and in the center build a pyramid of whipped cream, sweetened and flavored with vanilla.

← No. 3146 Charlotte with Strawberries or Raspberries Cold Entremets — Creams, Jellies & Charlottes No. 3148 Cornets of Orange Cream →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is the dish now generally known as Mont Blanc, written before the name settled. The whole thing hinges on getting the chestnut paste to the right stiffness — dry enough to hold a thread, moist enough to press through a sieve without crumbling.

Quantity"A few dozen sound chestnuts" is vague; three dozen large chestnuts is roughly 2 lb in the shell, which peels down to something over a pound of nutmeat. Ranhofer gives no yield or serving count. Buy more than you need, since a proportion always come out shrivelled or mouldy inside.
PeelingScore an X in the flat side of each shell before the scald. The papery inner skin only lifts cleanly while the nut is hot, so work in small batches and keep the rest in the hot water.
Cooking in milkBarely cover with whole milk and hold at a bare simmer, 30 to 45 minutes, until a nut crushes with no resistance. Ranhofer wants the milk fully absorbed, which means watching the last ten minutes closely — a scorched bottom flavours the entire purée.
VanillaA split vanilla bean simmered in the milk and a second scraped into the cream is closer to the intent than extract, which loses much of its aroma over a long simmer. Rinse and dry the used pod; it can be reused.
Sugar"Half its weight of sugar" is by weight of the sieved purée, not the raw nuts. For 1 lb of purée that is 8 oz sugar, which is sweet by current taste; 5 to 6 oz gives a chestnut flavour that still reads as chestnut.
Drying the pasteWork it over low heat with a wooden spoon until it pulls away from the pan in a mass and a spoon drawn through leaves a clean channel. Underdone paste collapses into a puddle instead of holding the vermicelli threads.
The vermicelliA potato ricer or a food mill with the coarse plate does this far better than a sieve and spoon. Press directly over the serving dish in a ring — the threads break if you try to move them once formed.
Assembly and timingThe chestnut ring can be made a day ahead and kept covered in the refrigerator; the whipped cream pyramid goes on within an hour of serving or it weeps and slumps.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894 as a full record of that repertoire, which was French to the bone \la crème rather than an English title. The pairing of sieved sweetened chestnut with a cap of whipped cream is generally traced to nineteenth-century French and Italian confectionery, where it acquired the name Mont Blanc for the obvious reason: a snowy peak above brown slopes. It appears among the cold entremets, at a time when chestnuts were an autumn and winter luxury item said to have reached American cities from Europe and, until the blight of the early 1900s, from native American chestnut stands as well.