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Puree of Chestnuts
Blanch two cups of hulled chestnuts, put them in two cups of boiling salted water, cook until tender, then rub through a sieve. Put into a saucepan with two cupfuls of veal or chicken stock; thicken with one tablespoonful of butter and one tablespoonful of flour cooked together (but not browned), add a teaspoonful of sugar; let simmer five minutes, season to taste and serve.
A short, thin chestnut soup of the kind that opened a formal dinner around 1900. The work is all in the chestnuts; the rest takes ten minutes.
- "Hulled" and "blanch" mean two separate peelingsChestnuts have a hard outer shell and a thin, bitter inner skin (the pellicle). Hulled means the shell is off; blanching in boiling water for a couple of minutes loosens the pellicle so it can be rubbed away, and any of it left behind will make the finished soup taste astringent.
- QuantityTwo cups of shelled chestnuts is roughly 10 oz, which means starting with about 1 lb in the shell. Score each one with an X before boiling or roasting and peel while still hot; they fight back once cool.
- Vacuum-packed or frozen chestnutsPeeled cooked chestnuts sold in jars, cans or vacuum packs are already blanched and tender. Use about 10 oz, skip straight to simmering them briefly in the salted water, and sieve. Unsweetened chestnut puree also works, though you will want less sugar.
- Sieve or blenderThe original rubs the cooked nuts through a sieve, the standard tool for purees in this period. A blender or food processor does it faster, but pass the puree through a fine strainer afterward if you want the smooth texture the book intends.
- Cook the roux without color"But not browned" is the instruction that matters. Two to three minutes over low heat is enough to lose the raw flour taste; any browning gives a nutty, toasty note that fights the sweetness of the chestnuts.
- The sugarA teaspoon is seasoning, not sweetening. It sharpens the chestnut flavor against the savory stock. Taste before adding more, especially if using commercial stock, which is often already slightly sweet.
- Consistency and finishingThe chestnuts are cooked in two cups of salted water and then let down with two cups of stock; how thin the result is depends on how much of the cooking water is absorbed or carried over, but expect a fairly loose puree. Add stock or a little cream if it tightens as it sits, which it will. Cream and croutons fried in butter were common finishes for puree soups of the period.
- YieldAbout 4 cups, serving four as a first course.
Chestnut soup belongs to the long European tradition of treating the chestnut as a starch rather than a nut, which would be ground for flour and boiled for porridge well into the nineteenth century in much of Italy, southern France, Corsica and the Iberian mountains. Its appearance as a sieved purée thickened with a pale roux follows French professional technique, well established by the later nineteenth century and filtered into American cookbooks through professional kitchens and cooking schools; the pattern here — vegetable cooked, sieved, loosened with white stock, bound with butter and flour — is the standard formula behind purees of many vegetables. The native American chestnut was still a major component of eastern forests in this period, before the blight identified in New York in 1904 destroyed the species as a timber and nut tree. Most chestnuts sold in the United States today are European or Asian.