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JANUARY 2006 |
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PASTRY PANTHEON: Chestnut Delights: Classic and Contemporary By Meryle Evans
"Chaude, marrons!" "Hot roasted chestnuts!" "Marroni caldi!" In any language, the cry of the street vendor with his basket of shiny, plump mahogany nuts and the tantalizing smoky aroma wafting from his brazier herald the arrival of cold, crisp days... the season for delectable chestnut treats. With the winter weather, pastry chefs add chestnut cakes and coupes, pavés and puddings to their seasonal dessert menus, and pâtisseries lure customers with the luscious whipped cream covered mountains of chestnut purée mont blanc, an elegant chestnut cream-filled bûche de Noël, or handsomely decorated boxes of glistening marrons glacés.
Since the dawn of civilization, the fruit of the majestic chestnut tree has been a gift of nature to both the humble and the haute, a dietary staple that provided sustenance to Corsican peasants, Japanese villagers, Native Americans, and an enticing gastronomic luxury for European royal palates. Poets from Virgil to Shakespeare, Longfellow and Thoreau to Robert Frost have paid homage to the "tree that can nourish an entire population for half a year." Village festivals in Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal still celebrate the fall harvest with traditional favorites like fritters, tarts, and cheesecakes. Hot roasted chestnuts dunked in a glass of new wine usher in Christmas in Italy, and in Japan, eating chestnuts on New Year's Day symbolizes mastery, strength, and success. This fall, EN Japanese Brasserie in Manhattan jumped the gun on 2006 with a chestnut celebration that included both savory and sweet dishes. EN asked students at The French Culinary Institute to participate in a chestnut dessert competition, and Beth Owens' winning entry, chestnut glacé with umi plums, was featured on the menu throughout the week. |
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Chestnut trees girdle the globe in temperate zones, with different species found in China, Japan, North America, and Asia Minor. The latter is the source of the European chestnut, Castanea sativa, that flourished in ancient Greece and Rome and was planted across the continent by Caesar's legions. Although there are many varieties of Castanea sativa, the two best known are the chataigne (castagne in Italian) that grow wild in the forests and have two or three nuts in each burr, and marrons, (marroni in Italian) round, plump larger nuts with just one kernel, cultivated for use in confections like marrons glacés. Candied chestnuts are mentioned as far back as the sixteenth-century when Italian poet Piero Aretino praised the marroni of Piedmont; in France they were a favorite at the court of Louis XIV, especially popular during the Christmas season. Marrons glacés have remained an expensive treat because they are complicated to produce—a 16-step labor intensive process that involves soaking the peeled nuts, a series of baths to carefully remove the chestnut skin, and immersion in sugar syrup for several days before a final glazing. Back in the 1880's in the Ardèche region of France, where many of the finest nuts are grown, a local entrepreneur, Clément Faugier, founded a marrons glacés industry to provide work for unemployed silk workers. Today, Faugier's marrons products are world renowned, including purée, marrons in syrup and cognac, and jams in jars, tins, and tubes. In Italy, Azienda Montana achieves the same high quality with chestnuts from Piedmont.
However, if you have time on your hands and a great deal of patience and would like to make your own marrons glacés, you can follow the step-by-step instructions given by gourmet guru Fred Plotkin, who had a marron epiphany at a pasticceria in Liguria and describes the process in Recipes From Paradise (Little Brown, 1997). Besides marrons glacés, the most notable culinary tribute to the nut is the mont blanc or, in Italian, monte bianco which both France and Italy claim to have created. Chestnut purées can be traced back to the fifteenth-century Italian cook Maestro Martino, who provided recipes for chestnuts that were boiled, mashed, and forced through a sieve "with a little good milk and all the spices." So it appears that the Italians have the edge on origin, but the French were quick to add the dish to their cannon of classics, anointing it with the name of the high alpine peak on the French/Swiss border. The Swiss, also chestnut enthusiasts, contrarily call the same dessert vermicelles (very thin strands of spaghetti). As a college student in Geneva, I was intrigued by the posters in pâtisserie and restaurant windows announcing the arrival of vermicelles. I assumed it had some connection to pasta but quickly discovered that the squiggles of riced chestnut purée gave the dish its name. While Swiss restaurants are currently underrepresented in New York, you can sample vermicelles at the charming Midtown Manhattan restaurant Swizz, where chef Deat Waser is planning to feature the dish on his winter festival menu. A superb version of monte bianco has become a signature dish at another Midtown restaurant in the Theater District, the illustrious Barbetta, celebrating its 100th birthday in 2006. Owner Laura Maioglio explains that the dessert has evolved over the years into a glorious, much lighter version of the original with a meringue base, pieces of marron glacé, and a bit of zabaglione.
Classic mont blancs also abound around New York, made by such fine pâtissiers as François Payard of Payard Pâstisserie, Eric Bedoucha of Financier, and Florian Bellanger at Fauchon. But perhaps the ultimate accolade for mont blanc comes from the beloved Parisian tearoom Angelina. When the owners opened a branch in Tokyo two decades ago, the pastry instantly became a Japanese favorite, and is now a standard at all of the bakeries that offer Western confections. Nesselrode pudding, an over-the-top chestnut dessert that reached its peak of popularity in Victorian times, has not fared as well as the mont blanc and has virtually vanished from the recipe repertoire. The dessert was named for Count Karl von Nesselrode, a nineteenth-century Russian diplomat active in international affairs from the Congress of Vienna in 1814 to the Treaty of Paris that concluded the Crimean War in 1856. Some sources say that the pudding was invented by the great chef Antonin Carême, who worked for the French statesman Tallyrand in 1814; others give the honor to the Count's chef a M. Mouy, Mony, or Monie. At any rate, the dish started life as an iced pudding with a custard base enriched with chestnut purée and maraschino liqueur, along with candied lemon peel, currants, and raisins soaked overnight in more maraschino. Whipped cream and stiffly beaten egg whites were added before the pudding was poured into a pineapple-shaped pewter mold and chilled. Queen Victoria's chef, Charles Francatelli, embellished his Nesselrode with dried cherries, chunks of pineapple, and pineapple syrup; other chefs substituted orange peel or candied fruits. Nesselrode soon became de rigueur at banquets and elegant dinners and was on the menu at the White House for the sumptuous wedding breakfast for President Ulysses S. Grant's daughter Nellie in 1874. Even Marcel Proust in Remembrance of Things Past wrote of a dinner guest who thought the dessert might necessitate a trip to the spa: "What do I see? A Nesselrode Pudding! As well! I declare I shall need a course at Carlsbad after such a Lucullan feast as this."
Twentieth-century cooks often tinkered with the recipe—some substituted macaroons or almonds for the chestnuts, others added gelatin or incorporated Nesselro Fruit Topping, a candied chestnut and fruit mélange made by the G.B. Rafetto Co., a New York City firm founded in 1888. The brand disappeared a few years ago but has happily been resurrected by Ultimate Gourmet, a New Jersey company devoted to producing old favorites including canned whole Avellino chestnuts from Italy. In the 1940's and 50's, Nesselrode pudding morphed into a glamorous chiffon pie popularized by Hortense Spier, a former Manhattan restaurateur who developed a wholesale business supplying top restaurants with scrumptious coconut custard, lemon meringue, and banana cream pies. But by the 1960's, tastes had changed and today Nesselrode pudding remains only a memory for nostalgic New Yorkers. While marron glacé, mont blanc, and Nesselrode pudding head the haute cuisine column, the chestnut has had an equally impressive humble legacy. In mountain towns in Italy and in Corsica, chestnut flour was a substitute for scarce wheat used for bread and for a flat cake, castagnaccio, flavored with olive oil and rosemary and sprinkled with pine nuts. The Italian botanist Castelvetrano, in The Fruit, Herbs & Vegetables of Italy (1614), recommended chestnuts with ricotta or cream and wrote that "when roses are in bloom our ladies take quantities of their dried chestnuts and mix them with rose petals in coffers and baskets where the chestnuts soon become soft and very fragrant." On the other hand, his English counterpart John Evelyn wrote in 1644 that the nuts were "a lusty and masculine food for rusticks at all times."
At about the same period, Captain John Smith exploring Virginia observed that the Indians boiled chestnuts for four hours to make both broth and bread. The chestnut trees that blanketed the East Coast of North America were invaluable for the colonists. Pioneers used the sturdy wood for building and farmers fattened hogs and dried the nuts to grind into flour during the winter. In 1854, Henry David Thoreau devoted a chapter of Walden to his enthusiasm for communing with nature in his native New England chestnut-covered woods. In the mid-nineteenth-century chestnut trees from China and Japan were introduced to the United States, but half a century later, a fungus from one of the imported trees, first noticed at the Bronx Zoo in 1904, was the beginning of a blight that within 50 years resulted in the virtual obliteration of millions of trees. Now, however, thanks to the agricultural experiments of modern plant scientists who are grafting disease resistant genes into Castanea dentata, a new American chestnut is being developed. The inspiring story is told on the website of the American Chestnut Foundation and by farmers who sell chestnuts via the internet, like Thomas Paine Farms and Allen Creek Farm. Native or imported, fresh, canned, whole, or in pieces, chestnuts are tempting contemporary New York City pastry chefs to update old classics and create new confections. Like Nesselrode pudding, chestnuts and cream, cold or frozen, are a serendipitous combination. Michael Laiskonis, executive pastry chef at Le Bernardin, describes his version: "In Chestnut, two squares of a frozen chestnut parfait sit upon an orange and vanilla soaked chestnut cake, with a crunch supplied by thin wafers made with chestnut purée. The whole dessert is offset just slightly by a 'salad' of roasted Bosc pears, candied orange peel, mint, and roasted chestnut. This would be a good example of how we take very simple and even classic ideas or combinations and through presentation and juxtaposition make them complex and contemporary."
Elizabeth Katz, executive pastry chef at Fiamma Osteria, adds another complementary flavor, chocolate. For her warm chocolate crostata with chestnut straciatella gelato and salted chestnut chips, the chocolate filling is baked in a honey graham crust and topped with a scoop of chestnut ice cream drizzled with melted chocolate and stirred to create shreds. Fresh peeled chestnuts, very thinly sliced, are fried in olive oil, tossed with kosher salt, and sprinkled on top. And at per se, executive pastry chef Sébastien Rouxel presents his version of a chocolate tart with candied chestnuts and chestnut ice cream. Other Nesselrode kissin' cousins include the chestnut crème brûlée with brown sugar shortbread pastry chef Heidi Kohnhorst is whipping up at the brand new David Burke at Bloomingdale's, Emily Luchetti's chestnut chocolate marquise in Four-Star Desserts (HarperCollins, 1996), made with crème frâiche, chestnut purée, and chocolate lady fingers, and François Payard's hedgehog cake. As Payard notes in Simply Sensational Desserts (Broadway Books, 1999) he enjoys looking for animals he can use as models for desserts and came up with the hedgehog, composed of layers of chocolate sponge, chocolate chestnut ganache, and whipped cream, molded in a round bowl, and frosted with more ganache.
A restaurant with the name Chestnut must certainly have an eponymous dessert on the menu, and in Brooklyn, chef Daniel Eardley obliges with a chocolate and chestnut pavé, laced with Armagnac. Back in Manhattan at Tony May's San Domenico, the Coda d'Aragosta is a Neopolitan sfogliatella filled with chestnut mousse and vanilla sauce. Roasted chestnut mousse was one component of a complex dessert at a December James Beard Foundation dinner. Jacques Van Staden of Alizé at Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas combined the mousse, caramel apples, and warm raisin pain de genes with crackle rum ice cream and spiced eggnog. Chestnuts were as well the finale at another December Beard Foundation event when Assaf Zamir of 22 West in Union, New Jersey presented a chocolate chestnut cake with caramelized pear and nutmeg-brandy reduction. Adding to the chestnut cake genre, cookbook author Dorie Greenspan's chocolate-caramel chestnut cake is composed of three layers flavored with sweetened chestnut puree. "Each layer," she explains, "is soaked in brandy syrup and spread with my favorite part of the recipe, a cinnamon-scented caramel ganache—a really satiny milk-and-bittersweet-chocolate ganache made with burnt sugar. Crumbled chestnuts are sprinkled over each layer and then the cake is finished with a bittersweet chocolate glaze and gold-dusted chestnuts." (Gold dust is currently available at www.lepicerie.com.) The recipe will be included in Dorie's forthcoming Baking From My Home to Yours and also appears in the December 2005 issue of Bon Appétit. Dorie's book will also include a recipe for chestnut scones, in which about a third of the flour is replaced by chestnut flour. "The chestnut flour," she explains, "is very finely ground like pastry flour, so it contributes to the scones light, tender texture and adds a note of sweetness and nuttiness." For Gina DePalma, executive pastry chef at Babbo, chestnut flour is a staple in the pantry for her updated version of the traditional castagnaccio. Full of dried fruits and nuts and chestnut honey, the recipe is a far cry from the rosemary-flavored original and a fitting tribute to the way pastry chefs are using chestnuts today. CASTAGNACCIO CHESTNUT MONT BLANC
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Meryle Evans is a food journalist and culinary historian who has written extensively about the world's cuisines for over twenty years. She was an editor of the American Heritage Cookbook, the Horizon Cookbook, and the eighteen volume Southern Heritage Cookbook Library. As a Contributing Editor at Food Arts, Meryle has covered cooking and culture from Australia to Chile, Turkey to Tunisia for the past fourteen years. She also lectures on various aspects of culinary history and was the curator of " The Confectioners Art," an exhibit at the American Craft Museum. Other food related activities include judging the James Beard and IACP cookbook awards and the Tabasco Community Cookbook Competition. |
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