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Shirred Eggs, Chevreuse
Split on both sides fifteen large, sound Italian chestnuts, place in a roasting pan and roast in the oven for fifteen minutes. Remove and skin with a coarse towel, place in saucepan with half pint water, cover the pan and briskly cook for twenty minutes; drain, press through a sieve into a frying pan, adding a gill cream and a tablespoon sherry. Season with two saltspoons salt, half a saltspoon cayenne pepper and half saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well and boil for five minutes. Divide this puree into six shirred-egg dishes, evenly. Crack two fresh eggs into each dish. Season them evenly with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Place in hot oven for three minutes. Remove and serve.
A chestnut purée used as a bed for baked eggs. The instructions are compressed in the way Delmonico's-era writing tends to be, and two of the numbers need adjusting.
- The three-minute oven is wrongEggs cracked onto cold-ish purée in individual dishes need roughly 8 to 12 minutes at 425F for set whites and soft yolks, and the purée should go in still hot. Three minutes will leave the whites clear and slack. Pull them when the whites are opaque but the yolks still tremble; they carry over in the hot dish.
- "Hot oven"Conventionally read as somewhere around 400-450F. If you want firmer yolks, drop to about 375F and go longer rather than raising the heat, which sets the edges of the whites into rubber before the centres cook.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of salt in the purée is half a teaspoon, and the cayenne and nutmeg are an eighth teaspoon each.
- The salt on the eggsHalf a teaspoon of salt and two saltspoons of pepper divided over twelve eggs is fine in total, but distributing it evenly by eye is not. Season each dish with a pinch, or salt after baking; salt sitting on a raw yolk will speckle it.
- ChestnutsFifteen large chestnuts in shell give roughly 8 to 10 oz of nutmeat and about a cup of purée. Vacuum-packed peeled cooked chestnuts work and skip the roasting and towel step entirely; simmer them in the half pint of water for 15 minutes to soften, then sieve. Avoid sweetened chestnut purée in a can.
- SkinningThe papery inner skin comes away only while the nuts are hot, which is the point of the coarse towel. Work in batches and keep the rest in the oven, or you will be prising at cold shells.
- SievingA food mill or a drum sieve is faster than pressing through mesh. A food processor gives a gluey texture rather than the light, dry crumb chestnut should have; if you use one, pulse briefly.
- ConsistencyBoiling the purée five minutes with cream and sherry is there to drive off liquid. It should be thick enough to hold a spoon track, so the eggs sit on it rather than sinking. If it slackens, keep reducing.
- YieldSix shirred-egg dishes, two eggs each, as a lunch or supper course. Ramekins of about 4 to 5 inches across work; set them on a baking sheet for handling.
"Chevreuse" is one of the many French garnish names inherited by American hotel cookery, and in nineteenth-century usage it is often said to signal chestnut purée, sometimes with the addition of a little game or truffle. Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, compiled The International Cook Book from exactly this repertoire: hundreds of short, terse entries in which a classical garnish name does the work that a paragraph of description would otherwise take. Shirred eggs were a fixture of the period's breakfast and light-supper menus, and a purée base beneath them was one way to turn two eggs into something worth naming. Chestnuts themselves were far more ordinary in an American kitchen then than now; the blight that destroyed the native American chestnut spread after 1904, and the sieved chestnut purée has largely dropped out of the everyday repertoire since.