No. 654

Chestnut with Gravy Garnishing

Garniture de Marrons au jus

Peel two pounds of chestnuts; scald them so as to be able to remove their red skins, then lay them in a buttered flat saucepan. Moisten them to their height with broth (No. 194a) and let the liquid come to a boil, then remove the saucepan to a slower fire while cooking the chestnuts, being careful to keep them whole. After they are tender the moistening should be reduced to a glaze, and then glaze them over with a brush before serving them. Another way is to split the shells on the side of each chestnut, plunge them into very hot frying fat, drain, and peel off the shells and red skins; cook them in boiling water with two ounces of butter, one ounce of celery, a little sugar and salt; simmer the whole and reduce the moisture entirely, then add a little meat glaze (No. 402) and some good gravy (No. 404); reduce and roll the chestnuts around so as to glaze them thoroughly and dress them either around a remove or in the center of an entree.

← No. 653 Cheese Crust Garnishing Garnishings No. 655 Chevreuse Garnishing →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer gives two routes to the same thing: whole chestnuts simmered in stock until the liquid has cooked down to a shining glaze. The work is all in the peeling and in the restraint afterwards.

The hinge: reduce, don't stirOnce the chestnuts are tender they are fragile as wet plaster. Reduce the liquid by evaporation over low heat and move the pan, not a spoon — tilt and roll the chestnuts so the syrupy stock coats them. Any stirring gives you a pan of chestnut crumbs.
Quantity and yieldTwo pounds of chestnuts in the shell yields somewhere over a pound and a half peeled, which is a garnish for six to eight servings of roast poultry, game or beef. Vacuum-packed peeled chestnuts work and skip the worst of the labour; they are already partly cooked, so give them ten minutes in the stock at most.
The two skinsChestnuts have an outer shell and a bitter inner pellicle, the "red skin," which clings once it cools. Peel them hot, a few at a time, and keep the rest warm in their water or fat; a cooled chestnut will not give up its pellicle without taking half the nut.
Scoring before fryingIn the second method, the slit in each shell is not optional. An unscored chestnut dropped into hot fat traps steam and bursts, throwing fat out of the pan.
A buttered flat saucepanThis is a wide, shallow pan — a sautoir or straight-sided sauté pan. The point is a single layer, so the chestnuts sit undisturbed and the stock reduces quickly over a broad surface.
Slower fire, and how longAfter the initial boil the chestnuts want a bare simmer with barely a tremble, generally 25 to 40 minutes depending on size and freshness. Test with a skewer rather than by timing.
The cross-referencesNo. 194a is one of Ranhofer's broths; a light unsalted veal or chicken stock stands in. No. 402 is meat glaze, i.e. stock reduced to a sticky syrup, and No. 404 is a brown gravy — a spoonful of demi-glace covers both, and if the stock is already good you can simply reduce it further and skip them.
"Around a remove"A remove was the substantial roasted or braised course of a formal dinner. The direction means the chestnuts are banked around the meat on its platter, or heaped in the centre of a ring of an entrée — a garnish, not a side dish passed separately.

A Little History

Chestnuts glazed in stock belong to the older French kitchen's way of treating the nut as a vegetable rather than a sweet: starchy, mild and cheap where chestnut woods grew, and for centuries a staple food in Corsica, the Limousin and much of northern Italy. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete professional reference, which is why this appears in a long numbered list of garnishings — a working cook was expected to pick a garnish to suit the roast and cross-refer to the stock and glaze recipes elsewhere in the book. Chestnuts were the conventional accompaniment to turkey, goose and venison in that repertoire, an association that survives in chestnut stuffing and in the marrons glacés of the pastry side of the kitchen, where the same nut is candied in sugar syrup instead of glazed in meat stock. The American chestnut blight, which arrived around 1904 and had destroyed most of the native trees within a few decades, took hold shortly after this book was printed; the chestnuts on sale today are overwhelmingly European or Asian.