[Sca-cooks] Chestnuts - Revisited

[Sue Clemenger]

I've never worked with chestnuts myself, but once, many (mumblety) years
ago, at the Halloween Party thrown by the Foreign Languages Dept. at the
University I attended, someone did lovely crepes with a filling of some sort
of chestnut puree.  I understood it to be traditionally French.  Funny that
I haven't thought of that party in decades!
Maire (in Northwestern Artemisia, where it has just started snowing.  Again.
Lordie, but you'd think this was a Great Lakes state from all the white
stuff we've been getting...so much for going out of town this weekend!)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius" <adamantius.magister at verizon.net>
To: "Cooks within the SCA" <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>
Sent: Friday, December 02, 2005 7:44 AM
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Chestnuts - Revisited


> 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