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Chestnuts Au Feu De Lucifer
Slit on both sides thirty-six large, sound Italian chestnuts, place on a roasting pan and roast in the oven for thirty minutes. Remove and peel them, place in a bowl, add two ounces sugar, and three tablespoons rum. Set fire to rum and stir with a spoon until the flame goes out. Then serve in the same bowl.
A flambé dessert of three ingredients, which means the technique carries the whole dish. Two details in the original are left to the cook: the oven temperature and how quickly the nuts must be peeled.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Roast chestnuts at 400-425F; thirty minutes at that heat is about right for large nuts, and they are done when the slit shells have curled open.
- Slit deeply, and on the flat sideSlit deeply -- the recipe says to slit on both sides. The cut must go through the shell into the inner brown skin, or the nut can burst. A shallow scratch also makes peeling far harder later.
- Peel while hotBoth the shell and the pellicle release only while the chestnuts are steaming. Work in batches with a towel over the pan; nuts that cool go stubborn and you will lose half of them to breakage.
- Two ounces sugarRoughly a quarter cup of granulated sugar by weight, if anything a little over. In only three tablespoons of rum it will not dissolve so much as coat the nuts as the alcohol burns off.
- The flambéRum at 40 percent alcohol lights readily; warming it briefly in a small pan first gives a reliable flame. Ignite away from the extractor hood, keep a lid within reach, and let the flame burn out on its own rather than blowing at it.
- Use an unlined vesselUse a sturdy vessel -- the instruction to serve in the same bowl suggests metal or heavy earthenware. Burning spirit and hot chestnuts risk crazing glazed china or cracking thin glass.
- YieldThirty-six chestnuts serves four to six as a small dessert or after-dinner sweet, and it must go to the table immediately -- the appeal is the warmth and the last of the flame.
- Chestnuts to buyItalian marroni are the large, single-kernel type the recipe calls for. Any large fresh chestnut works; check that each feels heavy and the shell is not loose, which signals a dried or mouldy kernel inside.
The name means simply "chestnuts in Lucifer's fire," the sort of menu French that turn-of-the-century hotel kitchens used for anything sent to the table alight -- the same impulse that gave us cherries jubilee and crepes Suzette. Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, filled The International Cook Book (1906) with thousands of short entries like this one, and the flambé belongs at the restaurant end of that collection: roasted chestnuts were winter street food across Italy, France and Spain, and dressing them with sugar and spirit was the restaurant version of a very ordinary pleasure. The word lucifer was also, in the nineteenth century, the common name for a friction match.