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October 27
Menu: Noisettes of Mutton; Latticed Potatoes; String Beans; French Salad *Chestnut Dainty; Coffee Chestnut Dainty-Boil 1 pound of Italian chestnuts 15 minutes; then remove shells and skins, and put back to boil until tender, with 1 cup of milk and 1 teaspoon Crisco, on the back part of range until soft enough to rub through a sieve. Crisco a mold well and line thickly with pulp, then add layer of apple sauce colored pink with currant jelly; then another layer chestnuts and again a layer of apple sauce. Over this squeeze some lemon juice, and bake in quick oven. Turn out on platter, and surround with whipped cream, colored with little currant jelly.
A chestnut-and-applesauce pudding baked in a lined mold, from the day-by-day dinner calendar at the back of the Crisco book. The hinge is the chestnut purée: it has to be dry and stiff enough to hold a wall against the mold, or the whole thing slumps when turned out.
- ChestnutsOne pound in the shell yields roughly 10-12 oz of peeled nut and about 1 1/2 cups of purée. Score an X through the shell of each before the first 15-minute boil; shells and inner skins come away far more easily while the nuts are still hot, and cold ones have to be reboiled.
- "The back part of the range"On a coal or wood range the back was the coolest zone, used for long slow simmering. On a modern hob this is the lowest setting with the pan partly covered, stirred often, since milk and chestnut starch scorch readily. Reckon 25-40 minutes depending on the nuts.
- CriscoStraight vegetable shortening, still sold under the same name, though the formula has been changed several times and no longer relies on partially hydrogenated oil. Butter can be substituted in both the purée and the greasing of the mold, but it is not an exact equivalent: its water and milk solids make it likelier to catch and it grips the mold differently.
- "Quick oven"Period usage puts this at roughly 400-425F. At that heat the mold needs only about 20-25 minutes: the point is to set the layers and heat them through, not to brown anything. A deeper mold at the lower end of that range for 30 minutes is safer against a scorched rim.
- The moldA 1-quart charlotte mold, pudding basin or small loaf tin. Grease it heavily and, if you want insurance for the unmolding, line the base with a disc of parchment. Let it stand five minutes out of the oven before inverting.
- ApplesauceUse a thick, unsweetened or lightly sweetened sauce; a watery one will bleed into the chestnut walls. The currant jelly is there for colour as much as flavour, so a tablespoon stirred into warm sauce is enough.
- SievingThe original rubs the cooked chestnuts through a sieve. A food mill on the fine plate or a ricer does the same job in a fraction of the time; a food processor tends to make the purée gluey.
- YieldPerhaps four to six as a dessert, though the recipe gives no yield. It calls for no sugar at all, so sweeten the purée to taste before molding unless the applesauce and jelly are doing all the work.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written to sell a then-novel product: a solid, shelf-stable, all-vegetable shortening made from cottonseed oil, launched by Procter & Gamble in 1911. Butter, lard and suet were the familiar household fats, though cottonseed-based compound shortenings had already been on the market for some years before Crisco. Its long "Calendar of Dinners" assigned a menu to every day of the year, and this chestnut mold falls on 28 October. The blight that would destroy the native American chestnut had been identified in New York in 1904 and was spreading through the eastern forests as this book went to press; whether that is behind the call for Italian chestnuts the book does not say, and imported Italian chestnuts were in any case valued for their size and ease of peeling. Sweet chestnut purée layered with fruit and served under whipped cream is a European idea of long standing, close kin to the French mont blanc.