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September 7
Menu: Chestnut Soup; Smothered Chicken Parsley Potatoes; Peppers Stuffed with Corn; Pineapple Salad Almond Custard; Coffee Chestnut Soup-Boil 1 quart chestnuts 20 minutes, then remove shells and brown inner skin, and put into saucepan with sufficient boiling water to cover them. Add piece lemon rind and 1 teaspoon salt, when soft remove rind and rub through a sieve. Then pour over them stirring all the time, 2 quarts white stock, 1/2 cup cream, 1 tablespoon Crisco rolled with 2 tablespoons flour, seasoning of salt and pepper. Bring to boiling point, remove from fire and serve hot.
A thin purée soup of the old French type, thickened at the end with flour worked into fat. The chestnuts are the whole job; everything after them is quick.
- A quart of chestnutsChestnuts were sold by dry measure in 1913. A quart measure of chestnuts in the shell is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb, which yields about 1 lb of peeled nuts. Vacuum-packed or jarred peeled chestnuts work directly; use about 1 lb and skip the first boiling.
- Peel them hotScore an X in the flat side before the 20-minute boil, and shell them a few at a time while still steaming. Once they cool, the brown inner skin welds itself to the nut and the work triples.
- White stockAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock, made from bones without roasting them, so the finished soup stays pale. A light chicken stock is the practical substitute; avoid dark or heavily reduced commercial stocks, which will muddy both colour and flavour.
- "Rub through a sieve"A blender or food processor does this in seconds, though a food mill gives the smoother, more even texture the original intends. Purée the chestnuts with a little of their cooking liquid rather than dry.
- The Crisco and flourOne tablespoon fat rubbed into two tablespoons flour works on the same principle as a beurre manié, though made with shortening rather than butter and with twice as much flour as fat. It goes in raw at the end; break it into small pieces and whisk them in so they disperse before the soup heats, or you will get pale lumps of paste.
- Bring to boiling point, then stopOnce the cream is in, the soup only needs to come to the boil and then off the heat, as the recipe directs; a hard, sustained boil risks the cream separating.
- SeasoningChestnuts are sweet and starchy and take more salt than seems reasonable. Season after the stock and cream are in; a scrape of nutmeg or a spoonful of sherry is a common addition to chestnut soups, though the original omits it.
- YieldAbout two and a half quarts finished, enough for eight as a first course. It thickens considerably as it stands; thin with stock when reheating.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil to introduce American cooks to Procter & Gamble's new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, launched in 1911 as a substitute for both lard and butter, and its "Calendar of Dinners" section supplied a complete menu for every day of the year — here September 8, chestnut soup followed by planked smelts. Chestnut soup itself is much older than the book and much older than America: a purée of boiled chestnuts loosened with stock and cream belongs to the French repertoire of potages purées, where the nut stands in for the split pea or the haricot. Its presence in an early-autumn menu is seasonal logic, chestnuts falling in September and October. What gives the entry a melancholy edge is timing: the chestnut blight had been identified in New York in 1904 and was moving through the eastern forests as this book went to press, and within a generation the American chestnut had been all but eliminated from those forests.