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Marrons Glacees
(Paris.) Boil, shell, and chop 2 3/4 pounds of fine chest-nuts; add 1 cup of sugar and pound to a paste. Put in a pan with 1 cup of milk, a tablespoonful of butter, and a teaspoonful of vanilla. Stir until thick and smooth. Take off, cool, make it into balls; and when hard, dip each in chocolate or coffee icing. Serve for afternoon tea or dessert.
Despite the name, this is not the candied whole chestnut of French confectionery but a chestnut paste rolled into balls and coated — closer to what a modern cook would call a chestnut truffle. It comes together quickly once the chestnuts are peeled, which is the whole of the work.
- The hinge: peel while hotChestnuts have two skins, the hard outer shell and a thin bitter inner pellicle that clings once the nut cools. Score each shell with an X, boil 15-20 minutes, and take them from the water a few at a time, peeling both layers while they are still too hot to hold comfortably. Any pellicle left behind will show as bitter flecks in the paste.
- What 2 3/4 pounds meansThat is the weight in the shell. Expect roughly 2 to 2 1/4 pounds of peeled nut meat, and rather less if the batch is old and shrunken. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts substitute directly by that peeled weight and skip the shelling entirely.
- Pound to a pasteA mortar is the tool the instruction 'pound to a paste' assumes; a food processor does it in under a minute. Pulse the warm chestnuts with the sugar until smooth rather than grainy — this is the difference between a confection and a mash.
- Cooking down the pasteStir over medium-low heat until the mixture pulls away from the sides of the pan in a mass and no longer looks wet, 8-12 minutes. If it stays loose the balls will not hold; too dry and they crack when rolled. It should behave like stiff marzipan when cool.
- "When hard"Chill the balls at least an hour, or 20 minutes in the freezer, before coating. Cold centres let the coating set fast and stay glossy instead of sliding.
- Chocolate or coffee icingFor chocolate, melt 8 ounces of good dark chocolate and dip with a fork. 'Coffee icing' here most likely means a fondant or glace icing — confectioner's sugar moistened with strong coffee to a thick pouring consistency — rather than buttercream.
- YieldThis makes a large batch, well over three dozen balls of roughly one inch. They keep a week refrigerated in a closed tin.
True marrons glacés are whole chestnuts simmered by degrees in ever-stronger sugar syrup over several days and then glazed, a slow Lyonnais and Piedmontese specialty that no home cook could reasonably attempt between other duties. What appears here under the Paris heading is the domestic shortcut: the same flavour reached by making a sweetened chestnut paste and coating it, a preparation more nearly related to the chestnut crème de marrons sold in French groceries. Chestnuts themselves were an ordinary autumn commodity on both sides of the Atlantic.