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Chestnut Pudding
(France.) Boil and peel 1 quart of chestnuts, then cook them for 1 hour with 1 cup of milk. Rub through a sieve, add 1 cup of sugar, a little mace, some salt, and 1/2 teaspoonful of vanilla. Then add the yolks of 5 eggs beaten, and the stiffly beaten whites. Mix, pour into a dish, and bake 15 minutes. Serve hot or cold, with jam or custard sauce or whipped cream.
A chestnut soufflé-pudding in all but name: the sieved purée is lightened with beaten whites and set in a hot oven. The original assumes a cook who knows what "bake 15 minutes" implies, so a few numbers help.
- How many chestnutsA quart measured in the shell is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb, giving about 1 lb (450 g) peeled nuts. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts work directly at that weight.
- PeelingScore an X in the flat side, boil or roast 8-10 minutes, and peel while genuinely hot. Both the shell and the bitter inner pellicle must come off, or the purée will be astringent and gritty.
- The hour in milkAn hour of simmering is not excessive here; it softens the nuts to the point where they sieve smoothly. Keep the heat very low and the pan covered, and add a splash more milk if it dries out and starts to catch.
- SievingA food processor gives a pasty texture rather than a fine one. Pass the cooked nuts through a food mill or a drum sieve; chestnut is starchy and wants to be pressed, not chopped.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, which was normal in books written for ranges without thermometers. Something around 375F/190C suits it, with the dish buttered and sugared.
- Fifteen minutesThat timing only makes sense in a shallow dish or in individual ramekins. In a deep two-quart dish the centre will still be liquid; allow 30-35 minutes and check that a knife comes out clean.
- Sugar and maceA full cup of sugar is sweet by current taste; two-thirds is ample if you are serving it with jam. "A little mace" can be read as about 1/4 teaspoon ground - mace is close to nutmeg in character, and more than that will bury the chestnut.
- FoldingBeat the whites to soft peaks, not dry. Stir a third into the heavy chestnut base to slacken it before folding in the rest, or the purée will deflate everything at once.
- YieldServes six, or eight in ramekins. Eaten hot it behaves like a soufflé and will sink within minutes; cold it settles into a dense, sliceable pudding, which is when the custard sauce earns its place.
Chestnuts were peasant carbohydrate across much of France well into the nineteenth century - the tree was called l'arbre à pain, the bread tree, in the Limousin, the Cévennes and Corsica, where the nuts were dried and ground into flour when grain would not grow. Sieved chestnut sweetened with vanilla is the base shared by chestnut confectionery, the Mont Blanc, and puddings of this kind. The bracketed "(France.)" is doing the work of an entire headnote, in the manner of collections that gathered foreign dishes under national labels.