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Vermicelli Chestnuts
(Italy.) Peel, blanch, and drain 20 large chestnuts, cover them with a syrup of sugar and water, and cook until tender. Take out, flavor the syrup with vanilla or any cordial, add the chestnuts, press all through a sieve or colander into a pretty dish. Use alone, or as garnish. Can be served with a lemon sauce, whipped cream, or melted jam.
A three-ingredient chestnut dessert whose success rests almost entirely on peeling and on how firmly the sweetened chestnuts are pressed. The original gives no syrup proportions and no timings, so both need filling in.
- The hinge: press once, do not stirForce the sweetened chestnuts through a ricer or a coarse sieve directly into the serving dish and leave the strands where they fall. Any smoothing or stirring collapses the vermicelli threads into a paste and the dish loses its whole point.
- Peel and blanch, in that order"Peel" here means slitting and removing the hard outer shell; "blanch" means the brief boil that loosens the bitter inner skin, which must come off completely. Score an X in each flat side, boil 3-4 minutes, and skin them a few at a time while hot, since the pellicle sets fast as they cool.
- Syrup proportionsNone are given. A light syrup of 1 cup sugar to 1 cup water is enough to cover 20 chestnuts in a small saucepan; more sugar makes a candied, sticky result that will not sieve cleanly.
- How long is "tender"Simmer gently 25-40 minutes depending on size and freshness. They should crush easily under a fork with no chalky core; chestnuts taken well past tender break up in the syrup and press into paste rather than distinct threads.
- Vacuum-packed or jarred chestnutsPeeled cooked chestnuts sold in vacuum packs or jars skip the whole peeling stage. Warm them in the syrup for 10 minutes only, since they are already cooked through and will fall apart with longer cooking.
- Flavoring the syrup"Any cordial" means a sweet liqueur - rum, maraschino, kirsch, or a chestnut-friendly brandy. Add it off the heat so the alcohol does not boil away, and use a teaspoon or two rather than a splash: the flavor concentrates as the syrup clings to the chestnuts.
- Wet or dryThe chestnuts go back into the syrup before sieving, so they emerge damp. If the mound looks slack, drain them briefly before ricing and reduce the reserved syrup to a glaze to spoon over.
- Yield and servingTwenty large chestnuts make enough for four small portions, or a garnish for a larger dish. Assemble within an hour or two of serving; the strands dry and stiffen on standing.
This is the Italian dessert now generally known as monte bianco - Mont Blanc - in which sweetened chestnuts are riced into a mound and capped with whipped cream in imitation of the snow-covered peak. The name given here, "vermicelli chestnuts", describes the technique rather than the mountain, since the pressed chestnut emerges in fine worm-like threads exactly as pasta does through a die; French cooks call the same preparation vermicelles de marrons. Chestnuts were a starch staple across the Alps and the Apennines long before they were a luxury, dried and ground for bread in years when grain failed, and sweetened purees like this one belong to the later, more prosperous end of that history.