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Marrons, Mrs. Ludlow
Slit on one side forty-eight large, sound Italian chestnuts, place on a tin and set in oven for ten minutes. Remove from oven, shell, plunge in boiling water for five minutes, drain, skin, and place in a small saucepan with a vanilla bean. Pour in cold milk one inch higher then chestnuts, cover pan and let boil until they easily break, when the milk should be nearly dried up. Take up vanilla bean, wipe and put it back in the sugar. Place chestnuts in mortar, thoroughly pound to a pulp, then rub through sieve into a vessel, add a half ounce best fresh butter, two tablespoons powdered sugar, two tablespoons Jamaica rum, and sharply mix with wooden spoon for two minutes. Pour two gills thick cream in a copper basin, place it on ice and whisk to a froth. Add two tablespoons powdered sugar, six drops vanilla essence, beat up two minutes more, add cream to chestnuts and lightly mix with a spoon. Evenly divide cream in six paper cases, nicely smooth surface with a knife blade to dome shape, arrange a piece candied marron on top of each case, dress on a dish with folded napkin and serve.
A chestnut cream in the French manner, set into paper cases like a mousse. Nothing here is difficult, but the chestnut peeling is the whole job and the original assumes you own a mortar.
- The hinge: peel while hotChestnuts give up both the shell and the inner brown pellicle most readily while they are hot. Work with a few at a time and return the rest to the warm oven or the hot water; once they cool the skin clings and the pieces come away ragged, which tells against a smooth cream.
- Quantity of chestnutsForty-eight large chestnuts is somewhere around 1¾ to 2½ lb in the shell, depending on size, giving something over a pound peeled. Vacuum-packed or jarred whole peeled chestnuts (about 1 lb) let you skip the roasting, shelling and skinning; they still need the milk-and-vanilla cooking.
- Oven for slittingThe ten-minute pass is only to burst the shells, not to cook the nuts. No temperature is given; a hot oven, around 400F, on a shallow pan, is the usual modern handling.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of thick cream is one cup. "Thick cream" here means heavy cream, 36% fat or better.
- Powdered sugarIn period usage this generally meant a fine-milled granulated sugar, closer to today's caster or superfine than to cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar. Either works, but superfine dissolves without the starchy note.
- Milk stageCover and hold at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil, and watch the last few minutes: the recipe wants the milk almost gone, which is also the moment it scorches. Stir up from the bottom near the end.
- Mortar and sieveA food processor does the pounding in seconds, but still push the purée through a fine sieve or a food mill. The sieve is what makes the finished cream feel like a mousse rather than a paste.
- The vanilla beanWiping the bean and burying it back in the sugar jar is a period economy worth keeping; a bean flavours sugar for months and can be used in this way several times.
- Copper basin on iceAny bowl will do so long as bowl, whisk and cream are all cold. Whip the cream only to soft peaks before folding, since the chestnut purée is stiff and will tighten the mixture as you mix.
- Yield and finishingSix paper cases, so six servings, each fairly rich. The "candied marron" on top is a marron glacé, sold in jars in syrup or wrapped as confectionery. Assemble within a few hours and keep refrigerated; the cream weeps if it stands overnight.
Marron is simply the French word for the large, single-kerneled cultivated chestnut, as opposed to the smaller wild châtaigne that splits into two or three lobes inside its shell, and the best of them came, then as now, from Italy and southern France. Sweetened chestnut purée lightened with whipped cream belongs to the same family as the Hungarian and Austrian Kastanienreis and the Parisian Mont Blanc, both of which predate this recipe and pile the purée into a dome or a nest of vermicelli-thin threads; the dome shape smoothed with a knife blade in this recipe is the same idea, done with a spoon instead of a ricer. Its appearance in an international cook book of this period, credited to a private contributor rather than a chef, reflects how thoroughly French dessert vocabulary had entered well-off American households by the early twentieth century, along with the paper cases, the copper basin and the bowl of ice. Jamaica rum, called for here, was valued for its heavy molasses character against the mild starchiness of the nut.