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Puree of Chestnuts (Slit on one side thirty-six)
Slit on one side thirty-six good-sized, sound Italian chestnuts and plunge them in boiling water for ten minutes. Drain and peel them. Place in a small saucepan with two and a half gills cold water. Season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Cover the pan, boil for a minute, then set in the oven for thirty-five minutes. Remove, place the whole in a mortar and pound to a smooth paste. Press through a sieve into a small saucepan, add one saltspoon grated nutmeg, half ounce butter and two tablespoons cream. Mix well, heat for two minutes and use as required.
A straightforward chestnut purée, but the measurements are pre-standard and the oven temperature is left to the cook's judgment.
- Gills and saltspoonsIn American usage a gill is 4 fl oz, half a cup, so two and a half gills is 1 1/4 cups of water (by the British gill of 5 fl oz it would be a little over 1 1/2 cups). A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: two of them for the pepper, one for the nutmeg.
- How many chestnutsThirty-six good-sized Italian chestnuts is roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb in the shell, yielding about 12 oz of peeled nutmeat. That makes about 1 1/2 cups of finished purée, enough for four to six as a side or as a filling.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, somewhere around 325-350F, covered as the recipe directs, will suit the thirty-five minutes specified; the chestnuts should be collapsing and most of the water absorbed.
- Peel them hotBoth the leathery outer shell and the tannic inner skin come away most easily while the nut is still hot; work in small batches and leave the rest in the hot water. Cooled chestnuts are much harder to peel cleanly, and any brown skin left on can make the puree taste bitter.
- Slit deliberatelyThe slit on one side is not decorative. Chestnuts have enough internal moisture to burst under steam pressure, and the cut also lets water in to loosen the skin.
- Mortar and sieveA food processor does the pounding, but still press the result through a sieve or pass it through a food mill. Chestnut fibre is stubborn and the sieve is what gives this its characteristic silkiness.
- Watch the pan at the endChestnut purée is starchy and scorches quickly once the butter and cream go in. Two minutes over low heat, stirring, is all it wants. If it stiffens on standing, loosen with a spoonful of cream or the chestnut cooking water.
- Use as requiredThe book assumes you know: alongside roast game, turkey or goose, folded into Brussels sprouts, or thinned with stock into soup. Sweetened with sugar and vanilla instead of pepper and nutmeg, the same base becomes a dessert purée.
Chestnut purée belongs to the long stretch of European cooking in which chestnuts were a staple starch rather than a holiday treat — in the mountain districts of Italy, Corsica and the Limousin they were dried and milled into flour and ate much like grain. The instruction to buy "Italian" chestnuts reflects a long-standing preference in the American market: imported European nuts, larger and easier to peel, dominated the greengrocers. The native American chestnut was small and sweet, and was later erased by the chestnut blight identified in New York in 1904. The savoury seasoning here — salt, white pepper, nutmeg — places the dish squarely in the French repertoire as an accompaniment to game and poultry, and the mortar-and-sieve method is the standard professional route to a smooth purée in any kitchen before mechanical mills became common household equipment.