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Chestnut Pudding
Chestnut pudding is an old dish, and a great favorite with the lovers of that much favored nut, but few seem to know how to prepare it. Make a syrup of a pint of water and a pound of sugar, and in this stew fifty chestnuts, which have been peeled and blanched. When they are tender, drain and press through a sieve; add these to one pint of sweetened cream in which the yolks of seven eggs have been slightly scalded. Flavor with vanilla and set aside to cool. When cool add the following preparation: In the syrup in which the chestnuts were stewed, stew a quarter of a pound of prepared raisins and the same of currants. Turn the chestnut preparation into a freezer and when frozen, add the fruit with a pint of whipped cream and cover closely until wanted to serve. Serve with or without sauce.
This is a frozen dessert rather than a steamed or baked pudding: a chestnut custard churned in an ice-cream freezer, with syruped fruit and whipped cream folded in at the end. Two things decide whether it works — how thoroughly the chestnuts are puréed, and how far the custard is cooked.
- The custard is the hinge"Slightly scalded" is the vaguest line in the recipe and the one most worth ignoring. Temper the hot sweetened cream into the seven yolks, then cook the mixture over low heat, stirring, until it coats a spoon and reaches 170–175F. Below that it will not thicken; above 180F it curdles, and a broken custard cannot be rescued by freezing.
- Fifty chestnutsSomewhere around 1¼ lb / 600 g in the shell depending on size, yielding perhaps 1 lb peeled. Score each one, boil or roast briefly, and peel while hot — the inner pellicle will not come away once they cool. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts (about 1 lb) are an honest substitute; sweetened chestnut purée is not, since the recipe already carries a pound of sugar.
- BlanchedHere it means removing the bitter inner skin, not plunging into boiling water and stopping the colour. Any pellicle left behind shows up as brown grit in a pale custard.
- Press through a sieveWith cooked chestnuts this is drudgery a food processor does better, but finish by pushing the purée through a fine sieve anyway. Chestnut has a granular texture that a frozen dessert exaggerates.
- The syrup and the fruitA pint of water to a pound of sugar is a heavy syrup, and the chestnuts will absorb a good deal of it. "Prepared raisins and currants" means stemmed, picked over and washed; 4 oz of each, stewed in the leftover syrup until plump, then drained well so they do not water the mixture.
- FreezingThe original assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt. Chill the custard thoroughly, churn in any modern ice-cream maker until it holds its shape, then fold in the drained fruit and the pint of whipped cream by hand — adding aerated cream to a running churn will only deflate it.
- Cover closely until wantedThat is the ripening step. Press parchment onto the surface, freeze for at least four hours, and move it to the refrigerator 15 minutes before serving; the fruit and the high sugar keep it softer than plain ice cream.
- YieldClose to 3 pints finished, serving eight to ten. If a sauce is wanted, a thin vanilla custard or a plain hot chocolate sauce suits it better than anything fruit-based.
Chestnut puddings run through English and French cookery long before this book — chestnuts boiled, sieved and enriched with cream and eggs are the same idea behind the French Mont Blanc and the sweetened chestnut purées sold in tins to this day. What marks this version is the freezer: the hand-crank ice-cream churn was common household equipment by the turn of the century, and cookbooks of the period froze dishes that had once been served warm, from puddings to rice to plum compotes. Chestnuts were a familiar autumn nut when this was written, though large chestnuts for cooking were often imported even then; the blight that spread through the first half of the twentieth century destroyed the American chestnut as a nut crop.