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Chestnut Soup (Italian style Peel and blanch)
(Italian style.) Peel and blanch fifty large chestnuts. Cook them in sufficient veal stock to cover, with 2 tablespoonfuls of bread-crumbs, 1 teaspoonful of salt, a little pepper and nutmeg, for 2 hours. To every quart of this now add a pint of hot milk. Press through a sieve, add the yolk of one egg, a tablespoonful of sherry, and serve with croutons.
A purée soup that depends entirely on the chestnuts being fully tender before they meet the sieve. The two-hour simmer in the original assumes older, drier nuts and a slower stove.
- How many chestnutsFifty large chestnuts is roughly 1½ to 2 lb in the shell, giving somewhere around 1¼ to 1½ lb peeled. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts work and save the peeling; skip the blanching step.
- Peel and blanchScore an X through the shell of each nut, boil or roast 10 minutes, then peel while hot — the inner brown skin lifts away only while the nut is still warm. Any skin left behind stays bitter and fibrous through the sieve.
- Cooking timeTwo hours is far longer than fresh chestnuts need today. Simmer 30 to 45 minutes, until a nut crushes to paste against the side of the pan, then move on.
- Veal stockVeal stock was a common neutral base in cookery of this period. A light chicken stock is the closest supermarket equivalent; avoid anything heavily seasoned, as chestnut flavour is easily buried.
- The egg yolkBeat the yolk with a little of the hot soup first, then stir it back in off the heat. If the soup returns to a boil after the yolk goes in, it curdles into threads and no amount of sieving will recover it.
- Press through a sieveA food mill or blender does this in seconds, but pass the result through a fine sieve afterwards anyway — chestnut skin fragments are the usual flaw in this soup.
- ProportionsThe milk is given as a ratio: a pint of hot milk to every quart of the cooked chestnut mixture, so roughly one part milk to two parts soup. Add it hot, and thin further with stock if the purée is stiffer than heavy cream.
- YieldThe recipe never states how much stock is used, so the yield can only be approximate — likely somewhere in the region of 2 to 3 quarts. The sherry goes in at the end, uncooked, so use something you would drink.
Chestnuts were mountain food long before they were a garnish: across the Apennines, Piedmont and Tuscany, chestnut flour and boiled chestnuts stood in for grain on land too steep and thin for wheat, which is why Italian cookery has so many chestnut soups, polentas and cakes rather than the single sweetened puré the English-speaking world knows. A soup like this one, enriched with veal stock, milk, egg yolk and sherry, is the bourgeois town version of that peasant dish — the chestnuts do the work of thickening that flour or rice would elsewhere. Here it appears labelled "Italian style."