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Potage, Italienne
Split one pound Italian chestnuts, place on a tin and set in oven for twenty-five minutes. Remove with a coarse towel, shell and peel, then place in saucepan with a half gill white wine, pint broth, half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper. Cover pan, let gently boil for forty minutes, press through sieve into a bowl and keep hot. Finely slice a carrot, onion, two leeks, a branch celery, two ounces raw lean ham, place in a saucepan with an ounce butter and gently brown for ten minutes, stirring frequently meanwhile. Then pour in a quart fresh (or canned) ripe tomatoes, two quarts water, a sprig thyme, two bay leaves, two cloves, a crushed bean garlic, two teaspoons salt, a teaspoon sugar and half teaspoon pepper; gently mix, then let slowly boil for one and a half hours. Strain soup through sieve into a basin, then through Chinese strainer into a saucepan, add chestnut puree, sharply mix with whisk and boil for ten minutes.
Knead on a plate a half ounce butter with an ounce flour and add little by little to soup, sharply mixing while adding it. Place fresh croutons and pour potage into a soup tureen and serve.
A two-part soup: a chestnut purée and a long-simmered tomato and vegetable broth, joined at the end and thickened with kneaded butter and flour. The measurements are pre-standard but all convert cleanly.
- Saltspoons and gillsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons of pepper is about 3/4 teaspoon. A gill is half a cup, making the half gill of white wine 1/4 cup.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. A fine sieve lined with a double layer of cheesecloth does the same job; the point is to catch the fibre and seeds the first sieving lets through.
- Roasting the chestnutsThe book gives no oven temperature; twenty-five minutes implies a hot oven. Score each nut through the shell on the flat side before roasting, and peel while they are still hot in the towel — the inner brown skin welds itself on as they cool.
- Chestnut shortcutOne pound of shell-on chestnuts yields roughly 10 to 12 ounces of peeled meat. Vacuum-packed peeled chestnuts substitute directly at that weight and skip the roasting entirely, going straight into the wine and broth.
- Raw lean hamThis means uncooked cured ham in the prosciutto crudo or speck line, not cooked deli ham. Two ounces is there for depth, not for eating; pancetta works if you cannot get it.
- The beurre maniéHalf an ounce of butter kneaded with a full ounce of flour is a stiff paste, and it must go in in small pinches with the whisk moving, or it will set into lumps that never disperse. Once all of it is in, the ten minutes of boiling is what cooks out the raw flour taste.
- Reduction to expectTwo quarts of water plus a quart of tomatoes simmering ninety minutes loses a good deal of volume, though the recipe does not say whether the pan is covered; if it is thinning past a soup consistency, cover partially rather than topping up with water.
- YieldPerhaps two to three quarts finished, depending on how far the base reduces, serving six to ten as a first course. Cut the croutons small and add them at the table — in the tureen they go soft within a few minutes.
The name is the book's own hybrid: potage is the French kitchen's general term for soup, while à l'italienne in professional cookery of this period ran to duxelles, ham, herbs and pasta. Chestnut soup belongs to the mountain cooking of Piedmont, Tuscany and Corsica, where chestnut flour and dried chestnuts long served as a starch staple in country where wheat did poorly, and the pairing of chestnut purée with a tomato-vegetable base is the sort of composition a hotel kitchen would build from that tradition rather than a village dish transcribed. The double straining, the beurre manié finish and the ham-and-aromatic browning are all marks of the classical French brigade method that shaped many of the hotel soups written down in English before the First World War — the international cookbooks of the era generally presented regional dishes translated into that vocabulary.