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Chestnut Stuffing
Cook in boiling salted water fifteen good-sized, sound Italian chest-nuts for thirty minutes. Drain and peel them, then place into a bowl; add two small slices bread soaked in water for five minutes. Chop very finely half a medium-sized onion, half ounce lean raw ham and lightly brown these in a saucepan with half ounce butter for five minutes and add to the bowl. Chop a raw chicken liver very finely with four branches parsley greens and half clove finely chopped, sound garlic and add it to the bowl, also with a saltspoon thyme and one raw egg. Season with half teaspoon salt and a saltspoon white pepper. Mix thoroughly with a wooden spoon and stuff the bird with it.
A Northern Italian-style forcemeat stuffing, built on chestnuts, bread and chicken liver rather than the bread-and-sage mixture an English or American cook of the period would expect. Most of what needs translating here is quantity language.
- Score before boilingCut an X through the shell of each chestnut before it goes into the water, or a few will burst. Peel them while still hot: both the shell and the papery inner pellicle come away cleanly at temperature and become nearly impossible once cool. Keep the pot of hot water nearby and pull out a few at a time.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. The recipe uses it twice, for thyme and for white pepper.
- Branches of parsley"Four branches" means four sprigs, stems included, which is roughly a tablespoon or two chopped. Flat-leaf is closer to the intent than curly.
- Squeeze the breadThe two slices soaked in water must be wrung out hard before they go into the bowl, or the stuffing will be slack and steam rather than set. Use a plain white loaf with the crusts off; modern sandwich bread with added sugar and emulsifiers behaves poorly here.
- Lean raw hamThis is prosciutto crudo or a similar unsmoked dry-cured ham, not American cured-and-cooked ham. Half an ounce is about one thin slice, chopped small; pancetta is the closest easy substitute.
- The chicken liverTrim the greenish bile spot and any connective tissue before chopping. It goes in raw and cooks inside the bird.
- Cook it throughThe egg and liver are raw going in. Stuffing cooked inside a bird must reach 165F at the center of the stuffing itself, not just in the thigh, so check with a thermometer. Pack it loosely, stuff immediately before roasting rather than the night before, and add roughly 20-30 minutes to your usual roasting time.
- YieldThe quantities suit a chicken of about 4 lb or a small guinea fowl. For a turkey, multiply by four or five and expect the roast to run considerably longer.
Chestnuts were a staple starch across the mountainous parts of Italy, France and Corsica long before they became a holiday luxury, and stuffings built on them belong to that tradition rather than to the bread-crumb school. What marks this version as Italian is the battuto underneath it: onion, parsley, garlic and cured pork chopped fine and softened in butter, with a chicken liver added for depth, a foundation close to what goes into a ragù. The recipe reads as it would have been dictated by a professional: no yield, no oven time, no mention of what bird it belongs to, on the assumption that whoever is stuffing the thing already knows how long to roast it.