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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 glacé, a confection generally traced to the chestnut-growing regions of the Ardèche 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.