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Eggs, Mancelle
Slit on one side eight sound Italian chestnuts, place in oven to roast for twenty minutes, remove, shell and peel. Place in a saucepan with two gills milk, two saltspoons salt and boil on fire until milk is nearly dry, place in a mortar and pound to a paste, then strain through sieve into a bowl. Boil twelve fresh eggs for eight minutes, remove and plunge in cold water for one minute, take up and shell them, then cut in two lengthwise. Scoop out yolks, add to chestnut puree with a half ounce butter, three saltspoons grated nutmeg and two tablespoons cream. Mix until well thickened, then evenly divide preparation in the twenty-four half eggs, dress on dish, pour a cream sauce over them and serve.
A stuffed-egg dish from the era when chestnut purée was standard restaurant garniture. The measurements are pre-standard but all convert cleanly.
- UnitsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is 1 cup of milk. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon: 1/2 teaspoon salt for the chestnuts, and roughly 3/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg in the filling.
- Oven for the chestnutsNo temperature is given; roast slit chestnuts at 425F for about 20 minutes. Peel them while still hot — the inner brown pellicle clings hard once they cool, and cold chestnuts are the reason this step gets abandoned.
- Chestnut shortcutVacuum-packed or jarred peeled chestnuts (roughly 3 to 5 oz, depending on how large the eight nuts are taken to be) simmer in the milk exactly the same way. Avoid sweetened chestnut purée, which is a dessert product.
- The hingeSimmer until the milk is "nearly dry" and no further. A dry purée seizes into a paste that will not take the cream, and a wet one slumps out of the egg whites. You want the texture of stiff mashed potato before the butter and cream go in.
- SievingA mortar and a sieve were the period route to smoothness; a food processor plus one pass through a fine strainer does it. Chestnuts are starchy rather than glutinous, so machine work will not turn them gluey.
- The eggsEight minutes gives a just-firm yolk, which is what you want for a filling. One minute in cold water is not enough to stop the cooking or loosen the shells — use an ice bath for at least five minutes.
- NutmegThree saltspoons is assertive by modern palates. Start with half and taste, since the filling is otherwise mild.
- The cream sauceLeft unspecified; in period usage a cream sauce generally meant a white sauce finished with cream, thin enough to coat. Pour it on just before serving, not in advance, or the whites weep.
- YieldTwenty-four halves, which serves six to eight as a first course or luncheon dish.
"À la mancelle" means in the manner of Le Mans, the old capital of the province of Maine, and in classical French garniture the term usually signals chestnuts — the purée turned up under game, in soup, and here inside a boiled egg. The International Cook Book (1906) belongs to the Delmonico's tradition of Alexander Filippini, where dishes were catalogued by their French tag and a cook was expected to know that a garnish name implied its own ingredient list. That assumption may explain the recipe's one silence: it names a cream sauce without telling you how to make one. Sweet chestnuts were a far more ordinary autumn ingredient at the turn of the century than now, sold roasted on city streets in America as well as Europe, which is why the recipe opens with whole nuts in the shell rather than a purchased purée.