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Chestnut Soup (French recipe Boil quart)
(A French recipe.) Boil 1 quart of large and sound chestnuts in salted water for 20 minutes; peel and chop them. Add 1 quart water, a teaspoonful of salt and one of sugar, and the rind of a lemon. Cook for half an hour, then rub through a sieve. Add 2 quarts white stock, a tablespoonful of butter blended with a tablespoonful of flour, pepper, and a little parsley. Stir for twenty minutes and rub through a sieve. Serve with toast.
A straightforward purée soup whose only real difficulty is the chestnuts themselves. Everything after the peeling is simmering and sieving.
- The hinge: peel while hotScore an X through the shell of each nut before boiling, and peel them a few at a time straight out of the hot water. Once they cool, the inner brown pellicle welds itself to the nut and the job becomes miserable.
- A quart of chestnutsMeasured in the shell, that is roughly 1.5 lb, yielding a little over a pound peeled. Vacuum-packed or jarred cooked chestnuts work directly — use about 1 lb and skip the first boil. Do not substitute sweetened chestnut purée, which is a dessert product.
- Lemon rindPare the yellow zest only, in strips, and leave the white pith behind; a whole rind of pith will turn the soup bitter over half an hour. Fish the strips out before sieving.
- White stockUnsalted veal or chicken stock, pale because the bones were not roasted. Any light chicken stock serves. Since two quarts of it carry the seasoning, taste before adding more salt than the recipe's teaspoon.
- The butter and flourA tablespoon of each is beurre manié, worked cold into a paste and whisked in off the boil so it disperses. Twenty minutes of stirring at a bare simmer cooks out the raw flour; a hard boil will only spit hot purée at you.
- The second sievingThe period cook had no alternative. A food mill or an immersion blender does the first pass in a minute; pass the finished soup through a fine sieve once at the end if you want the smooth texture the original is after.
- YieldAround three quarts finished, serving eight to ten as a first course. It thickens noticeably as it cools and will want thinning with stock on reheating.
- Serving"Serve with toast" means small croutons or fingers of dry toast alongside, not toast in the bowl.
Chestnut soup belongs to the cooking of regions where the tree fed people before the potato did — the Ardèche, Corsica, Limousin, and across the border in Tuscany and Piedmont — and the chestnut was long known as the bread tree for exactly that reason. What is notable here is the treatment: the nut is handled as a vegetable, boiled and sieved into a velvety purée bound with beurre manié, in the same manner a French kitchen would treat green peas or turnips, with sugar and lemon rind only as background seasoning rather than to make it a sweet. Its appearance in an English-language book, flagged simply as "a French recipe," reflects the authority French practice held over the formal soup course in Anglo-American households, where a well-set dinner was expected to open with a clear soup or a purée of this kind.