[Sca-cooks] Chestnuts - Revisited

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Hullo, the list!

Okay, so what do people do with chestnuts? Apart from the usual  
roasted, or in stuffing?

I believe there's a brewet in either Taillevent or le Menagier (but  
called "English") that calls for them, as well as some 14th-century  
English recipes. I STR there's a recipe in Apicius that uses them in  
a lentil dish that I liked.

More recently there's a modern Italian cake that involves baking  
sweetened puree with pine nuts (I wanna say it's called castignacci,  
but I'm not sure this is an accurate memory, and my books are all  
over the place -- I mean big-time -- at the moment while we rearrange  
furniture yet again). This might easily be period, although I have no  
direct evidence, and it's been alleged that the modern French Mont  
Blanc aux marrons has period Italian forebears. This last is  
basically a mound of milled or "riced" chestnut puree, sweetened and  
flavored with vanilla, then coated with whipped cream. Oddly enough  
it also sometimes turns up on the menus of the finer Chinese  
restaurants (usually without the whipped cream), and chestnuts also  
appear in the fillings of various steamed rice dumplings roughly  
corresponding to tamales.

Then there are candied chestnuts (not my fave), and chestnut flour  
sometimes turns up around Passover one of the primary baking starches  
for flourless cakes.

Chestnut ice cream is good, too, and I assume one could make a sort  
of sweet-potato pie thingy with them, too. Polenta.

What have I left out?

Adamantius



"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la  
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them  
eat cake!"
     -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  
"Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
     -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry  
Holt, 07/29/04