Home › The World's Kitchen › Chestnut Fritters
Chestnut Fritters
Slit both sides of thirty large chestnuts, place on a roasting pan, roast in oven twenty minutes, remove and carefully shell them with a coarse towel. Place in a saucepan four ounces sugar, one teaspoon vanilla essence, a tablespoon rum and one pint cold water, and as soon as it comes to a boil drop in the chestnuts and boil thirty minutes. Remove from fire and let cool off in the syrup, lift chestnuts up with a skimmer and thoroughly drain them, then boil syrup fifteen minutes.
Prepare a frying batter, roll chestnuts in the batter, then plunge in boiling fat and fry ten minutes, turning with skimmer once in a while. Remove, drain on a cloth, strain syrup into a dish, arrange chestnuts over, sprinkle a little powdered sugar over all and serve.
A straightforward candied-chestnut fritter, but two of its timings belong to a coal range and will ruin the dish on a modern stove.
- Frying time is the hingeTen minutes in hot fat will blacken a battered chestnut long before the centre benefits — the nut is already fully cooked and syruped. Fry at 350-375F only until the batter is set and golden, roughly two to three minutes.
- The batter is assumed, not given"A frying batter" in a book of this vintage is generally a plain flour-and-egg coating slack enough to cling: about 1 cup flour, 1 egg, a pinch of salt and enough milk or water to reach heavy-cream consistency. A little melted butter or a stiffly beaten white folded in at the end lightens it.
- Roasting the chestnutsThe original gives no oven temperature; twenty minutes implies a fairly hot oven, and around 425F is a reasonable modern equivalent. Slit through the shell on both sides or they burst, and shell them while still hot — the coarse towel is there to let you rub off both the shell and the bitter inner skin before it welds itself to the nut.
- MeasuresFour ounces sugar is by weight, a generous half cup granulated (about 115 g). A pint is two cups. Vanilla essence is what is now sold as vanilla extract.
- Boiling in syrupThirty minutes at a full boil will reduce a good share of the chestnuts to mush. Keep the syrup at a bare simmer and expect some breakage regardless; choose the largest, soundest nuts and handle them with a skimmer, not a spoon.
- The finishing syrupAfter the chestnuts come out, the fifteen-minute boil is to thicken what is left into a pouring sauce. Watch it toward the end — the syrup is a thin one (four ounces of sugar to a pint of water), and reduced too far it will darken toward caramel and stiffen as it cools.
- YieldThirty chestnuts serves four to six as a dessert. Fry in batches so the fat temperature does not drop, and serve promptly; the batter softens under the syrup within minutes.
Chestnuts occupied a place in European kitchens that is hard to picture from a supermarket now — in the mountain districts of Italy, Corsica, southern France and Spain they were a staple starch, dried and milled into flour as often as eaten whole. Sweetened chestnuts poached in syrup are the same idea that produces the French marron glac raced to the chestnut-growing regions of the Ard che and Piedmont, where the sugar was a way of making a peasant crop into a luxury. Dipping the candied nut in batter and frying it is a further step in that direction, and it was built from an ingredient still sold roasted on city street corners every autumn.