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Chestnut Salad
Remove the shells from one pint of large French chestnuts, scald them and remove the skins, then boil in slightly salted water until tender but unbroken. While hot, pour over them a French dressing, put aside until cold, then serve on lettuce with mayonnaise.
A short recipe that depends almost entirely on peeling and cooking the chestnuts correctly; everything after that is assembly.
- A pint of chestnutsMeasured by volume, as dry goods often were. The recipe does not say whether the pint is taken in the shell or after shelling; a pint of in-shell nuts weighs somewhere around three-quarters of a pound, and will yield appreciably less than a pint once shelled and skinned.
- "French chestnuts"The large European sweet chestnut, Castanea sativa, sold in the period as French or Italian chestnuts because the native American chestnut was smaller. Any large marron-type chestnut works; vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts are a legitimate shortcut, though they break more easily.
- Shelling and scaldingScore an X through the shell on the flat side first, or the nuts steam inside and are miserable to peel. The scald is to loosen the inner pellicle, which is bitter and must come off entirely; work with a few at a time and keep the rest hot, since the skin re-adheres as they cool.
- Boiling until tender but unbrokenThis is the hinge. Chestnuts go from firm to mealy rubble in a couple of minutes, so simmer gently rather than boil hard, and start testing at 15 minutes. Lift them out with a slotted spoon the moment a knife tip slides in.
- French dressing, 1900 senseSimply oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, in the neighbourhood of three parts oil to one of vinegar. Nothing creamy, no mustard required.
- Dressing while hotNot incidental. Warm chestnuts absorb the vinaigrette the way warm potatoes do in a potato salad; dressed cold, they stay bland.
- ServingLettuce leaves as a cup, the chestnuts spooned in, a spoonful of mayonnaise on top. If you make the mayonnaise by hand with raw yolk, use pasteurised eggs for anyone elderly, pregnant or immunocompromised.
Chestnuts were a far more ordinary ingredient in American kitchens around 1900 than they are now: they were roasted by street vendors, stuffed into turkeys, pureed into desserts and, as here, treated as a vegetable. The specification of French chestnuts reflects the trade of the day, when large imported European nuts commanded a premium over the smaller, sweeter native American chestnut, which was still abundant in eastern forests before the blight of the early twentieth century effectively erased it. The dish itself belongs to the long vogue for composed salads served on a lettuce leaf under a spoonful of mayonnaise, a format that fills the salad chapters of American cookbooks from the 1890s well into the 1930s and covered everything from fruit to fish. The two-stage dressing, vinaigrette while hot and mayonnaise at the table, turns up in other salad recipes of the period, though how general the practice was is not something the printed record settles.