by Weiao Xing (@WeiaoX)
‘Fresh raw chestnuts are in season in the winter months. Choose heavy nuts with tight-fitting shells’; this is how the celebrated trio of cookery writers Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle, and Julia Child introduce this ingredient in their influential work Mastering the Art of French Cooking.[i] With an emphasis on ‘fresh produce and ingredients’, their oeuvre ignited a culinary revolution in the United States upon its first publication in 1961.[ii]
When we think of mouth-watering chestnuts in December, our minds often drift to the sweet variety – roasted chestnuts at Christmas markets, marron glacé nestled in panettone, and crème de marron filling and adorning a bûche de Noël. Instead, les Trois Gourmandes, as they were known, taught their readers how to prepare chestnut purée and whole braised chestnuts, considering chestnuts as vegetables to complement meat dishes. As they explained, ‘chestnuts have a traditional affinity for roast turkey, goose, venison, boar, wild duck, and pheasant; they also go with pork and with sausages’.[iii] These meat products, integral to many Christmas dishes, evoke a sense of warmth and comfort in winter.
References to ‘roasted Chestnuts blanched’ and chestnuts for decoration can be traced back to seventeenth-century food writing. For similar meat dishes with chestnuts, one recipe book from 1674 provided instructions for boiling ‘Cocks, Bustards, Turkey, Pheasant, Peacock, Partridge, Plover, Heathcocks, Cocks of the wood, Moor-hens, or any Land Fowl’.[iv] This publication showcased popular and innovative dishes in England and France for Anglophone readers. Unlike single-author books, such as those written by Hannah Woolley (c.1622 – c.1674) who published on cookery, medicine, and household affairs, this book was credited to a series of ‘approved cooks of London and Westminster’, though only four of them were recorded by their initials on the title page.[v] At that time, printed recipe books in England were often annotated, enriched, and revised by various literary and social participants, including unattributed authors, professional booksellers, and collectors.[vi] Across time, places, and languages, chestnuts engage in the flavour and texture of many wintry cuisines continually prepared and consumed by diverse practitioners.
[i] Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle, and Julia Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), 517.
[ii] Julia Child, ‘Papers of Julia Child, 1925–1993’, MC 644: T-139: Vt-23: Phon 15, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute.
[iii] Beck, Bertholle, and Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, 518.
[iv] The English and French Cook Describing the Best and Newest Ways of Ordering and Dressing […] (London: Printed for Simon Miller at the Star, at the west-end of St. Pauls, 1674), 42–43.
[v] John Considine, ‘Wolley [Other Married Name Challiner], Hannah’, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/29957; The English and French Cook.
[vi] Margaret J. M. Ezell, ‘Cooking the Books, or, the Three Faces of Hannah Woolley’, in Reading and Writing Recipe Books, 1550–1800, ed. Michelle DiMeo and Sara Pennell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 159–78, https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526129901.00017.
doinghistoryinpublic.org 