Left: Marrons glaces en chemise. Right: Glazed candied chestnuts

Although fresh chestnuts can be used, it’s far easier to start out with IQF peeled chestnuts (see below). The processing that delivers them whole, absolutely skinless and in a neither-cooked-nor-raw state is probably something we don’t want to know too much about;* but whatever it is has the happy side-effect of making them much more receptive to candying and much less likely to break.

As you know if you’ve ever tried this or been on the Christmas list of somebody who has, all those recipes floating around the internet are lying: starting with fresh chestnuts is fraught with difficulty, most of it starting after you get the nuts peeled and skinned. They have to be cooked before they go into the syrup or they turn to leather. Cooked chestnuts have a deep-seated need to fall apart. And then turn to leather, often as not.

The website of Clément Faugier, source of the marrons glacés of my youth – and that of most other people born after 1882  – describes a method of manufacture that cannot be emulated at home. Never mind the number of steps (16), one of which is wrapping the cooked nuts in little squares of tulle to keep them from falling apart, the real problem is that home kitchens are not equipped with the stainless steel baskets. giant vacuum cookers, mobile grills and drying tunnels used by the professionals.

All that being the case, it’s kind of amazing how close you can come – and it doesn’t take days and days, either.

Home made marrons glacés

Ingredients:

lots of simple syrup: equal volumes sugar and water, the former dissolved in the latter and simmered for 3 or 4 minutes. Let it cool to room temperature before proceeding.

4 or so inch length of  vanilla bean, split

Chestnuts, the bigger the better. Some will break and a few will have to be broken for testing so be sure to start with plenty

(Egg white, for en chemise, or

A candy thermometer, for glazed)

With IQF chestnuts:

1. Thaw and rinse. Place in a deep, heavy saucepan with the vanilla and about 4 times as much syrup as nuts (by volume).

2. Slowly bring to barely a simmer, cover the pan and cook over the lowest possible heat until the nuts are semi translucent and seem to be soft when poked with a toothpick, about an hour and a half. If they’re not ready, keep cooking until they are.

3. Cut open and taste a sample nut – it should be completely soft and sweetened right to the heart. It may or may not be completely translucent.

4. Drain the nuts and place the whole ones on a rack over a shallow pan. (Reserve the bits and the syrup.) Heat oven to 300, turn it off, put in the chestnuts and let them dry, turning once or twice. The goal is a dull surface that is not tacky, produced as quickly as possible without actually baking the nuts and toughening them. Repeat the oven routine if necessary.

5. Store the dry nuts in an airtight container in a cold place. After 10 days or so they’ll form an uneven sugar coating that’s too thin to be really crunchy. For that, finish en chemise or with glaze, any time after they’re dry but shortly before serving. Pieces can stay in the syrup in the fridge or canned, ready to pour over ice cream or whatever.

With Fresh Chestnuts:

1. Begin by piggily standing there in the store choosing the very largest, firmest chestnuts in the bin – Faugier uses nuts that run 45 to 60 a kilo.

2. Soak the chestnuts in cold water for a few hours to soften the shells, then score the shells in several places with a sharp knife – in addition to the traditional x on one side, give them a few slits all the way around. Be careful to avoid cutting into the nut itself.

3. Put the nuts in cold water, bring just to the boil and cook for 2 to 4 minutes, depending on size. The goal is to loosen the shell and skin and soften a very thin layer of the actual chestnut.

4. Peel the chestnuts with a very sharp knife, not only removing shell and skin but also exposing most of the inner flesh, as though you were peeling a potato. For some reason exposing them this way lets you cook them – carefully! -in syrup without getting the leather effect. While you’re at it, try to trim so they’re all about the same size and can cook in the same amount of time. This matters more with the fresh ones than the IQF’s (as far as I can tell).

5. Place in a deep, heavy saucepan with the vanilla and about 4 times as much syrup as nuts (by volume).

6. Slowly bring to barely a simmer, cover the pan and cook over the lowest possible heat for 45 minutes. The surface should remain placid throughout this time; do not let them boil. Turn off the heat, cover the pan and let them sit overnight.

7. Again bring to the bare simmer and keep cooking super slowly until the nuts are semi translucent and seem to be soft when poked with a toothpick, about an hour and a half. Proceed as in steps 3-5 above.

CANDIED CHESTNUTS EN CHEMISE

Probably tastier than glazed and a great deal easier to make, just less impressive visually.

1. Start in the evening. Heat the oven to 300. Stir some egg white just to loosen, trying to avoid introducing air bubbles. Put a sheet of tinfoil shiny side up on a cookie sheet  and set out a plate of sugar or vanilla sugar.

2. Dip each nut or large nut piece in egg white, draining it well so it’s barely coated. Roll in the sugar to coat completely and place on the foil. Put them in the oven, turn off the heat and let them dry overnight. Store uncovered in a dry place for up to a week. How long the coating lasts in its crunchy state is a function of residual moisture and ambient humidity, so if you want these for a party it’s a good idea to coat them only a day or two ahead.

GLAZED CANDIED CHESTNUTS

Sugar work. Oh joy. But it isn’t really that hard; just be sure to choose a dry day and someone you really need to impress.

1. Prepare: Put a sheet of tinfoil shiny side up on a cookie sheet. Have the dry whole chestnuts sitting on a rack. If you have a candy dipping fork, find it. Otherwise use a carving fork. (Plain forks work fine, but the close tines get gummed up with syrup quickly so you’ll probably need more than one). Find or make a double boiler with a deep upper pan. Fill the bottom pan with boiling water then keep it hot.

2. Remove the vanilla bean from the reserved chestnut syrup, pour the syrup into the upper pan and insert the candy thermometer. Add enough additional syrup to generously cover the bulb of the thermometer. Boil to just below hard crack, @290 degrees. ( Temperature will keep climbing after pan is removed from heat)

3. Put the syrup pan in the waiting hot water to keep warm. Dip the chestnuts and place them on the foil – you can do about 10  before the foreign material makes the syrup sugar up; make an extra pan of clean caramel if you want to do a lot of them. They should keep at least overnight if the chestnuts were dry enough to begin with and there’s not much moisture in the air but if you’re going to all this trouble it’s probably safest to make them no more than a few hours before serving, just to be on the safe side.

Chestnut or Marron – is there a difference?

Not botanically or at least not at the grocery store. American chestnuts are Castanea dentata, and a lot of commercial chestnuts grown in the US are Chinese chestnuts, C. mollissima, but anything coming from Europe is likely to be C.  sativa, the European chestnut, or a hybrid thereof. And that’s where the marrons come in. Just as a perfect Red Delicious apple has come quite a way from the wild thing by the roadside, so the marron types have been bred to be bigger than other chestnuts, less inclined to have 2 nuts in the shell and, bless them, be smoother, with fewer deep folds for the skin to get wedged into.

The price for all this is a tree that bears later and produces smaller crops when it’s finally old enough, which helps explain why marrons are the priciest chestnuts.

The Clement Fougier site promises an English version shortly but meanwhile the translated version is a lot of fun in its own way.

Buying IQF chestnuts

The ones I used are from Chestnut Growers Inc. and the reason I buried them all the way down here is that the ones I used were sent to me by a chef friend, so I can’t vouch for Chestnut Growers’ customer service or the quality of its chestnuts compared to other brands.

More about Chestnuts

This is the 3^rd of a 3-part series. Part 1 was about fresh chestnuts and Part 2 celebrated the dried ones, a terrific convenience food that should be better known.

* Update: Just got the call to Chestnut Growers returned: Representative Corey Allen says the ( imported from Italy) peeling machine uses a combination of intense heat, steam and brushing to peel and skin the chestnuts.

And in the meantime of course baking cookies, including vanilla almond Moth Cookies and The Spritz Bill Really Likes. Links to more never-fail all-timers after the jump, but first:

Our favorite Pepparkakkor, crisp, spicy, better-than-gingerbread. The quintessential Christmas Cookie and if the Christmas part gives you trouble just use a bird cutter and call ‘em doves of peace.

The recipe makes approximately a zillion. The dough is easy to mix, easy to handle and perfectly happy to stay in the icebox for weeks while you slice off chunks of it to roll and cut and decorate. Or not; a lot of people like them best plain.

PEPPARKAKOR

This is the recipe exactly as given to me about 35 years ago by someone who would certainly get credit if I could remember who it was. Whether that tiny amount of vinegar is really necessary (to ensure rising, presumably) I couldn’t say, never having been moved to mess with a good thing.

½ lb. butter

2 c. dark brown sugar

1 egg

1 c. molasses

1/3 c. strong brewed coffee

2 tablespoons orange juice

1 teaspoon white vinegar

3 tbl. finely shredded orange zest

2 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. cloves*

1 tsp. ginger*

½ tsp. salt

8 crushed cardamom seeds or ½ tsp. ground cardamom*

7-8 c. all purpose flour.

1. Thoroughly cream the butter and sugar. A wooden spoon will do fine. A stand mixer will do even finer.

2. Beat in, in order, the egg, molasses, coffee, juice and vinegar. Let the batter sit a minute or two, then beat in the zest, soda, salt and spices.

3. Add flour gradually until you have a dough the texture of soft, very slightly sticky clay. Let it mature in the fridge for at least a couple of hours.

4. Heat oven to 350. Roll, cut and bake on buttered or parchment-lined baking sheets for 8 to 15 minutes, depending on thickness. These do rise quite a bit, so even paper thin dough yields reasonably durable cookies. Anything over about 1/8 inch yields cookies that are too durable – unless you plan to dunk them or hang them on the tree.

* Don’t forget to use a bit more if the spices aren’t absolutely fresh.

Rolling and Cutting

You can always tell a home baker’s assortment: here a yard-sale find, there a weak moment at the cookware store...as time goes on it turns into a piece of living history.

Cookies are more tender and shapely if you go the paper route instead of rolling the dough on a lightly floured board and then transferring the shapes. Roll between sheets of waxed paper, lifting and smoothing the paper as needed. After rolling, chill briefly to firm, then peel off one sheet of the waxed paper and replace it with parchment. Flip the dough, peel off the second piece of paper and cut the cookies.

Leaving the cutters on the dough makes it easy to crowd in as many shapes as possible.

Use a narrow-bladed knife to lift away the scraps. Set large scraps on a piece of parchment and reserve until you have sheet full, then bake for family nibbling. Keep all the small scraps together, roll them out at one go and cut into simple squares so they all get used up without re-re-rolling.

Decorating

Classic material is Iron Icing – lightly beaten egg white and confectioners’ sugar. A few tips for using it are in the Spritz recipe post (link above), which also has the recipes for pfeffernüsse and, via R. L Beranbaum, David Schamah’s Jumbles probably the world’s best jumbles. Iron icing actually tastes pretty good if you use cornstarch-free glazing sugar and add a drop of rum or kirsch.

Let the thick glaze sit overnight to harden if you want to decorate using edible ink.

The edible ink comes out of the Foodoodlers, as easy to use as marking pens. I don’t know why I left the ladies bald when I could have given them chocolate curls distantly resembling my own, so please don’t ask.

Other cookies made this year or on the list for this weekend: Sour Cream Piecrust ravioli with apricot filling, Pizzelle made with Bill’s grandmother’s iron and Universal Suit-Yourself Fruit and Nut Bars , everything that’s good about fruitcake but not so damned much of it.

Just a little reminder it’s not going to be winter forever.

First, though, present time. Here’s my perennial shopping list ( with source links) of  good gifts for gardeners.

Membership in The Garden Conservancy is on that list without further explanation and at this point none may be needed. But just for the record: after starting small and being exceedingly Northeast-centric, the Conservancy is now saving significant gardens all over the US and offering benefits almost everywhere. Just the ticket for garden-loving friends, regardless of skill level or actual possession of garden.

Like good causes too numerous to mention, the Conservancy raises money by offering garden tours. Unlike (most of) the rest of them, that’s “garden tour” as in one garden at a time.

Thanks to an Open Days plan modeled on the British version, it’s easy to visit (and pay for) only the gardens that interest you, and the goodies are ongoing. Open Days occur throughout the the growing season from early spring to late fall.

The Hudson Valley is particularly rich in viewing options, which I’m usually too busy to exercise. But every year there are a few things too good to resist. Two years ago those things included the Hyland /Wente garden featured in the February issue of Fine Gardening magazine. Seeing that perfectly nice article helped inspire this one because being in good gardens rules; paper and screens are mighty poor substitutes for the real thing.

Not seen or mentioned in the story: The rill down the center axis has goldfish in it and a dark bottom that helps the water reflect the sky.

Local Thanksgiving bouquet – the very last chrysanthemums

Twelve people ate here between Thursday night and Saturday morning– several of us more than once – so even though the Poughkeepsie branch ( Saturday night) had leftovers of its own we ought, by rights, to be out of turkey.

We are not, even though the bird only weighed 12 pounds after I got done boning it.  There was so much other food the turkey was as in my opinion it should be, almost incidental.

If you don’t remember to remove the string that helped restore approximate turkey shape, the starring bird will have a bikini line.

What to do with the leftover turkey besides eat it is one of those subjects – like the yearly advent of strawberry season – that makes veteran food columnists think warmly about retirement. There cannot be a possibility that has not already been explored.

On the other hand, it’s not clear exploration is wanted. At least not all the time; some dishes deserve to be classics and since this year’s menu* was a tribute to same it seems only reasonable that soon we’ll be enjoying another hardy perennial:

TURKEY TETRAZZINI

Named for the Italian diva, Luisa Tetrazzini, a coloratura who made her US debut in 1908, toured the country in subsequent years and wowed ‘em  with the Chicago Opera in 1912 -13. The recipe’s origins are shrouded in mystery, but we can surmise that it too was a hit. It’s in the 1912 edition of Fannie Farmer’s New Book of Cookery (Where it doesn’t, pace Wikipedia, include any almonds) so it must have been pretty widely known by 1911.

If you grew up on one of the many “quick” versions of T.T. you’re probably glad the fashion has switched to things like turkey tacos. Canned soup can easily put one off cream sauce forever. But the real thing is really delicious. Inconvenient though this truth may be, after the sandwich and cold stuffing phase, leftover turkey breast is happiest in the company of dairy products.

8 ounces spaghetti

1/2 cup butter

1/2 pound mushrooms, sliced

3 1/2 tablespoons flour

3 cups turkey or chicken stock

3 tablespoons dry sherry

1 1/2 cups light cream or 3/4 cup each heavy cream and milk

salt and white pepper to taste

3 1/2 cups bite size pieces of cooked turkey breast

1 1/2 cups coarse dry breadcrumbs

1/2 cup grated Parmesan

1. Cook the spaghetti. Chop it into 3 inch lengths and set it aside.

2. Melt 2 tablespoons of the butter in a non-reactive skillet over medium heat, add the mushrooms and sauté until well browned. Remove and reserve.

3. Add 3 tablespoons more butter to the skillet, stir in the flour and cook for 2 or 3 minutes. Slowly stir in the chicken stock and cook, stirring occasionally, until the sauce is slightly thickened and creamy, 15-20 minutes. Stir in the sherry and cream, season to taste with salt and white pepper and reserve. Butter a shallow casserole – a gratin pan is ideal.

4. Heat oven to 375 degrees. Combine half of the sauce with the mushrooms and spaghetti and place the mixture in a ring around the sides of the casserole. Combine remaining sauce with turkey and put it in the middle.

5. Melt remaining butter, mix with breadcrumbs and cheese and spread this topping evenly. Bake until browned and bubbling, about 45 minutes.

8 servings.

Note: Many modern recipes call for peas and/or red bell pepper in addition to almonds. The nuts are overkill in my opinion, but at least true to the spirit of the thing. Once you start adding vegetables like peas you might as well skip the spaghetti and crumbs and go directly to pot pie.

Remains of the day:

*Somewhere in there among the staples, indulgences, and half-consumed jars of jam, there is a lot what’s left of This Year’s Menu:

classic renditions of roast turkey and giblet gravy, bread stuffing (with onions, celery, sausage and chestnuts), corn pudding, greens from the garden, cranberry sauce, and Mamie Eisenhower’s pumpkin pie. The green salad from the garden is long gone and so is the apple pie. There isn’t any leftover squash because I didn’t make any and the other leftover dessert has no business in this lineup, being a very Italian pear crostata, based on an apple one from In Nonna’s Kitchen, by the estimable Carol Field.

Don’t see the turkey? It’s

in the cellar

But at Thanksgiving we always try – ok; I try; I’m the one who makes up the menu – to celebrate our own harvest, both from the wild and from the gardens.

Some years this includes the meat; we have venison. Bill has even on one occasion shot a deer so close to the back garden we were probably eating our hostas and roses along with the rest of the produce.

This year it’s turkey, just so I can keep my hand in. Local but not heritage. And the corn for the pudding  ! you absolutely have to have corn pudding! will be a mixture of our own Black Mexican and some kind of tender hybrid from Beth’s farmstand up in Maine.

Corn from the days when we grew more kinds. Top to bottom: Ruby Queen, unknown hybrid (seed purchased and name forgotten by Bill), the Black Mexican we still grow, at the cornbread stage

You can’t really call this holiday “Corn Day,” or at least I hope you won’t, but if there’s one new world food that must be on the table, in thanks for itself and for the generosity of the poor fools who saved the colonists’ bacon, Zea mays is it.

You can have cornbread stuffing, of course, as many southerners do, but for those of us who quite correctly feel that bread stuffing is the way to go (and please don’t even talk to me about rice), corn pudding is an ideal way to have maize on the table.

This worthy classic is also called green corn pudding and Nantucket corn pudding but for some reason not corn custard, although that’s what it is. Proportions of corn to custard vary, as do instructions for preparing the corn.

Idea generally is to feature the milky interior of the kernels, rather than their tough skins. If the corn is fresh you can score down the kernels and scrape out the insides. If it’s not, you can puree the corn and then put it through a medium-mesh sieve.

Or not. We are in the not camp, in part because the occasional whole kernel adds a welcome bit of texture, in part because a lot of the scrape-out bit happened back when I was putting up the corn and in part because enough already. Thanksgiving isn’t about refinement (unless you’re using commercially frozen corn. Doesn’t matter if it’s organic, it’s all extracted from the cob as great big honking tough-skinned kernels. It’s worth it to puree this product, though straining remains unnecessary.)

CORN PUDDING
For 6 servings:
Butter for the baking dish(es)
2 c. corn, scraped from the cob, pureed (see above) or taken from your freezer just long enough ago to thaw.
1-3 tablespoons flour – the starchier the corn the less flour you need
½ tsp. each salt and white pepper – you could add more, but at Thanksgiving there are likely to be people who salt the food without tasting it, and/or people on low-salt diets
3 eggs + one yolk
2 cups liquid dairy product: whole milk, light cream or a mixture of milk and heavy cream. All cream is too rich; low-fat milk is not tasty and although you could probably use soy milk I can’t vouch never having tried.
1. Heat the oven to 325. Butter a 1.5 qt. baking dish or twelve 1/c. ramekins*. You’ll be baking it in a water bath, so find an appropriate outer pan and heat a kettle of water.
2. Combine the corn, flour and seasonings. In a separate bowl, beat the eggs and yolk to mix well and lighten without aerating, then beat in the dairy. Add the corn, turn the mixture into the baking dish(es) and put the dish(es) into the water bath pan.
3. Put the pan into the oven and carefully pour in hot water to come halfway up the sides of the dish(s). Bake until the center barely jiggles and a blunt knife blade emerges clean, about an hour for the single dish,  40 minutes for the ramekins.

As a Thanksgiving bonus, ovenspacewise, corn pudding is tastiest served tepid or cool (refrigerated and then permitted to return to room temperature).

There is a brief digest – with recipes – of information on the place of corn in our culinary history on the Food Timeline.

* This is the correct number – apologies to anyone who only buttered 6 and had a lot of leftover custard to quickly find a pan for.

It’s also a reminder – should Black Friday find you in appliance shopping mode –  that shiny black surfaces in the kitchen are a very bad idea. This is not a room where it’s wise to have water spots look like dirt.

Poor fellow can barely see himself; and I'd just washed it that morning!

Bill built the Maine oven so the process could be filmed, so in a way I can thank The Three Thousand Mile Garden for that one. But that one never would have happened if the New York one hadn’t came first, and although Bill did of course build it the ultimate thanks there should probably go to his childhood.

There were several outdoor bread ovens in the neighborhood where he grew up, including one at his grandmother’s place. He never forgot the bread –  or the fact that the ovens were home built – so when I started making wistful noises about how nice it would be to have one they fell on receptive ears.

Next thing to be thankful for: he’s a man of action. And that goes not just for building the ovens but also for providing instructions. You too can have one of these things, not without a bit of work and not instantly, needless to say, but very very inexpensively and it ain’t rocket science, either. Here’s his step by step how-to:

THE OUTDOOR BREAD OVEN

story and pictures by Bill Bakaitis

For a number of years now, ever since The Three Thousand Mile Garden TV series aired, we have received a steady stream of requests for assistance/plans/advice for building an outdoor bread oven similar to the one constructed for that series. The latest request, from a school in Australia, prompted me to post this commentary.
I know it is not time for most of us in the Northern Hemisphere to begin construction, but we can dream on and plan for the spring, while the Australian crew begins work now. In the plans which follow the first four or five steps can actually be done now, in winter, well in advance of that burst of construction that comes with spring.
Our two ovens, the first in New York, and the second in Maine, were inspired by reading The Bread Ovens of Quebec*, by Lise Boily and Jean-Francois Blanchette. Although the Italian side of my family, and the community in which they were immersed, made and used several outdoor ovens, these were all made of stacked paving brick and mortar.  That tradition quickly fell into eclipse as the American-born children of my mother’s generation found the glory of ready-made, plastic-wrapped, balloon-bread.  Why not? It Builds Bodies Twelve Ways proclaimed the wrapper. It was quick and easy to buy, to eat, to forget. Sort of soft in the mouth and in the mind, an authentic American product of the 1950’s.

I was too young to fully understand how those Italian bread ovens were constructed and Uncle Richard, my mother’s brother could find only one person, Angelo Don Francisco, who recalled how it was done. His sketchy instructions, however, were no match for the weighty anthropological reconstruction of the French Canadian ovens described by Boily and Blanchette.  It is a text I highly recommend. All of our plans and techniques were highly influenced by their research.
Here is how we did it.

HOW TO BUILD A CLAY/BRICK OUTDOOR OVEN

1. DIAGRAM YOUR OVEN:

Decide upon the size and shape of your oven. From the photographs on p. 69 of the Boily/Blanchette text, a simple scaling grid overlay set for the length you decide upon will give the height of the oven and its position at apex. The formula and graph on pp. 38 and 39 will give the height of the door opening relative to the height.  From p. 48 the length to width ratio of the base can be determined, and by subtracting the 10″ thickness of the clay ‘loaves’ which will make the side walls of the oven the inner size of the oven will result.

Plans for the New York Oven, as extrapolated from Boily/Blanchette typological considerations (p 38-39) overlaid onto Diagram, p 69.

Both of our ovens closely followed those dimensions used in the construction of the oven constructed for Boily text.

The base (see step 2 below) is 75″ X 47″ OD. The inner height of dome at apex is 32″, and the outer dimension (w 5″clay wall above) is 37″. The height of our door opening is 20″; the width of the door opening at its base is also 20″.  This gives a theoretical working interior of 27″X55″ (24.5 sq ft) although the Maine oven turned out to be substantially larger than the first one we made in NY.

This size oven will bake @ 10 round loaves plus 4- 8 baguettes of bread, along with a small pizza or two in one baking, followed by a few pies and slow cooked beets, tomatoes or other vegetables using only the residual heat of the firing. It is the long heat storage time of the clay mass which makes all of this possible.

If this oven is too large for your needs, you will want to reduce the dimensions by following the ratios arrived at by the research team. Leslie will describe various baking processes and techniques in a separate post.

2a. DECIDE UPON THE LOCATION OF YOUR OVEN:

It should be close enough to the kitchen to be convenient for watching the fires, transporting the raised loaves into the oven and the baked loaves into the house, as well as loading the oven with all of the subsidiary items to be baked: pies, roasts, root crops and the pans of ripe tomatoes to be put up. At the same time, consider the fire hazards and avoid placing the oven next to a combustible structure. You will see that we realized the importance of safety AFTER we built the New York oven. Over two tons of stone, mortar, and clay are impossible to move, and we need to be especially mindful of fire hazards when we use this oven, which places limits on the times we can safely use it.

2b. BUILD A BASE OF STONE, MORTAR, SAND AND RUBBLE:

It should be as long and wide as your plans dictate and end up being knee to thigh high so as to make the heavy work of tending the fires and baking the bread easy.  Ours was made of stone and matter that we gathered from our yard and garden.  I swept the road before the road crew in the spring for much of the sand and gravel, and some stone I gathered from road cuts in the area.

3. POUR A CEMENT HEARTH:

3a. Lay a pair of full dimension 2×4’s (such as the rough cut stuff found at sawmills) on edge across the top of the base during the last round of leveling. These will extend out beyond the side of the base and will become the support for the roof. If you can only find lumberyard milled material, it may be wise to double up or go with 4×4’s.

3b. Over these construct a 2X4 frame around the perimeter of the base. This will correspond to your OD measurements. However, if you extend the 2X4’s a foot to the front of your base you will be able to use these arms as a foundation for a removable apron, useful for staging the loaves after the fire has died down and the coals have been raked.

Fill this void with cement, imbedding the metal door frame 2 ” into the cement. For good measure I placed a few bolts through the perimeter 2X4’s into the inner void, to be firmly affixed when the cement was poured. In this way they become permanent redundant construction members able to be used in the future if need be.

3c. Our metal door opening frames were bent at a local foundry from stock 6″ X 3/16″ flat AR metal.  Remember to add a 4″ lip on both ends and to have the height 22″ (for a 20″ opening) since it will be set 2″ deep into the cement.

All of the above  can be done this fall and winter preceding the spring work with the sapling armature and clay. Winter is also a good time to locate and test the clay for step 5.

4. BEND A FRAME OF SAPLINGS INTO THE SHAPE OF AN IGLOO CAGE:

4a. With magic marker trace out the inner dimensions of your oven; mark the apex point.

4b. Nail together some scrap lumber to hold the saplings,

4c. Gather together a few dozen flexible saplings .5 to 1.5″ in diameter. Apple, Maple, Viburnum, and Alder are all good. Gather more than you think you will need. Then begin the bending, shaping and wiring using the thickest saplings to set the major meridians. I used electric fence wire or twine as needed.

4d. As the shape comes into being you can progress to smaller and smaller twigs. To my eye this armature is the most beautiful part of the oven, and yet it is there to be sacrificed in the first fire. Photos alone will save this work.

4e. Cover the armature with old sheets. We learned that by doing this the resulting interior of the oven is both smoother and larger.

5. OBTAIN YOUR MARINE CLAY: Locate and test your clay. In NY we used some from the east bank of the Hudson River. In Maine a local farmer brought us a load. Before you even bring the clay to your site, however, you will want to test a small loaf by firing it in a bucket of burning sawdust. The first site I came upon made a great looking brick, but it crumbled at the first touch

6. MAKE YOUR CLAY LOAVES AND BUILD UP THE OVEN WALLS.

During this process it is VERY important to wear a pair of tough rubber gloves. Otherwise the clay, which has a high pH, will work its way under your fingernails and into your skin causing puckering, chapping, and painful lesions. Take it from me, and I ain’t tender.

6a. Mix marine clay with sand and earth into a doughy paste. Children tromping in a mixing trough are traditional, but a rototiller works better. As it is used it will chew up a small depression in the ground into which clay, sand, and water can be added to the rototilled earth making a superb mixture. The object is to lighten the clay and make it sticky.

6b. Bind the clay with hay or straw into “loaves/bricks” of about 20-40 pounds each. Clay is incredibly heavy, even after lightening it with sand and earth. The purpose of the straw is twofold: it binds and lightens the bricks, making them easier to work with, and more importantly creates a myriad of air passages that allow steam to escape during the firing process. Without these passages the bricks will explode. You can easily see why the early brick making industry was located near places where both salt hay and marine clay were available. Haverstraw Bay, for example, is derived from “Paver straw”.

6c. Set the wet loaves of clay over the frame, molding them together. The walls should be 10″ thick at the base gradually thinning to 5″ over the top of the oven. It helps to lay in a course of reinforcing chicken wire over the first few courses above the metal door opening as this area expands under use, the heat causing cracks. We did not know to do this on the NY oven and a permanent crack now exists over the arch. The second oven, in Maine, incorporated the chicken wire reinforcement and has only two hairline cracks to the left and right of the arch, a result of better distributing the stress of expansion.

6d. I placed a single removable plug into first course at the rear of the oven so that I could use this as an auxiliary air intake if needed. A threaded pipe with end cap could also be used.

6e. Allow the clay to dry for a month, loosely covered to protect  from the weather until the roof is built. Patch any cracks as they appear.

7. ROOF YOUR OVEN TO PROTECT IT FROM THE WEATHER:

Once fired, the clay will become brick on the inside, but the outside will remain clay and must be protected from weathering. We originally used the board and batten method used in Quebec, but now (16 years later) are having the wood replaced by corrugated metal roofing, which is both fire proof and rot-resistant. For either method use the 2X4’s (3a above) as the platform. They run crosswise under the hearth. Lengthwise over these attach another set of 2×4’s and then use these as the base onto which the roof is supported.  Since some rot appeared in this secondary set over the years, I used pressure treated material this year as a support for the metal roof.

8. BURN OUT THE ARMATURE, FIRE THE BRICK:

At the end of the drying period, a series of small fires inside will burn out the wooden cage and turn the clay into brick.  These first fires will demonstrate the efficiency of the door to dome ratio planned in step 1. A bed of fire brick may be added above the cement floor. For us, they seem to work better than the naked cement.

9. MAKE A DOOR:

Now that all the wood is burned out the clean sweep of the metal door frame provides a perfect template for constructing your door. I used a plywood core with aluminum flashing on the inside, boards on the outside and wooden handles.  It is only put in place after the fire dies down and the coals are spread out to temper the held heat, and also during the baking process itself, so it will never see direct flame.

10. TO BAKE:

10a. Build 2 fires, 1/2 hour apart. Build the first fire in front and then push it to the rear as wood for the second fire is added. If one large fire is laid, flames will be more likely to shoot out the front and ignite the A-Frame roof.  To be safe, we keep a fully charged garden hose at the ready as we fire the oven. When the fire dies down spread the coals evenly over the entire surface of the hearth.

10b. Rake out the coals; we use a hoe to scrape them into a metal wheelbarrow or bucket. Use a wet mop to swab out the hearth.

10c. The bread is laid directly on the hearth, the door closed and the held heat of the brick does the baking:  10 minutes for pizza; 20 minutes for small loaves; 30-45 minutes for large loaves.

compare to the New York walls Celia's inspecting

More on the baking techniques, some tested recipes, oven maintenance tricks, etc. in future posts.

The Boily/Blanchette text has a much more detailed description of the construction of the oven. You will want to read it for the more complete process, particularly if you are a guy like me who assumes the y chromosome is a natural problem solving device.

*Note: After Bill put in the link for buying the  book, we learned it was a lot rarer  - and a lot more expensive! – than we realized. If you don’t mind downloading lots of pdf files, you can get it free online from the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

Photos of Bill building the oven by Leslie

Fresh chestnuts, roasted and peeled

Ok, It’s finally time for chestnuts, an autumn/early winter thrill that’s one of the last truly seasonal crops still standing. If you’re anything like me, you’re just about jumping up and down with glee right there in the produce section. But if you’re like I used to be, your joy is tempered by the knowledge that they’re a royal pain to prepare.

They needn’t be, as it turns out. I now eat more than is probably wise, having discovered a couple of tricks that lessen the pain considerably. I still haven’t found an easy way to go from raw in the shell to skinless roasted, but with these methods it’s easy enough to make me glad they’re low-fat.

(The skinny on dried chestnuts is here.)

PREPARING FRESH CHESTNUTS

The first rule is to buy more than you need. All bulk chestnuts, no matter how fancy, will include some that are moldy or wormy and in my experience no amount of in-store inspection is enough to guarantee they will all be sound. Keep them cold until needed; they won’t spoil at room temperature but they will start drying out.

The next step is the first royal pain part: each chestnut shell must be cut through, aka scored, on the round side. This keeps the nut from exploding in the oven and, because the shell contracts, provides a place to start peeling from. Classic way of doing it is to use a small, very sharp knife to cut an X.

Chestnuts being hard, small and round, X-cutting was fraught with hazard for the first roughly 40 years of my chestnut-roasting life. But then I met the chestnutter, which helped enormously, and then I figured out – duh! – that you can simply soak the tough shells into knife-receptive tenderness.

The chestnutter:

talk about a specialized tool!

You put a chestnut in the hopper, close lid one, then close lid two – in theory just firmly enough to score the shell without damaging the nut..

chestnut ready to be scored.

Works like a charm – if you have strong hands. That first view isn’t a distortion. For reasons best known to themselves the manufacturers have made the top handle shorter than the others, so it can be difficult to get a good grip.

Plus you’ve got to give it a pretty firm squeeze but not so firm a squeeze you drive the cutter deep into the flesh of the nut. But all that said it does do the job, quickly and reliably. Available from Fante’s,* among others.

Soaking:

Simplicity itself. Put the chestnuts in a deep, heatproof bowl. Pour on enough boiling water to cover generously and let them sit for an hour or two. Score them one at a time, leaving the others in the water until wanted.

ROASTING

In my experience the open fire is more a romantic fantasy than a good idea. There’s a reason street vendors are always surrounded by an acrid effluvium of incinerated shell, and having a chestnut roasting pan – also available at Fante’s  - doesn’t really help.

But if you’re determined to try and the “open fire” is an actual fire, not the flame on the top of the stove, you’ll need a pan with a very long handle. They sell ‘em at Spitjack – where, please be warned, I have never shopped. Watch out for ebay, where I just saw several antique chestnut roasters with oh please good grief wooden handles.

We do roast chestnuts on top of the woodstove (covered by an overturned pan) for social eating, but in the oven is the way to go if you need more than a few. One layer in a jellyroll pan at 375 for about 15 minutes. Shake the pan once or twice to turn them. Many recipes say to oil the pan but for the life of me I can’t think why – it seems very unlikely to boost heat transfer and it’s not as if they’d stick.

BOILING

Reader Greenpa (see comments) sent along this link to a chestnut peeling video that offers a vast improvement over X-cutting when what you need – or can use well enough – is halved semi- raw peeled nuts. Having now tried it I can offer the following refinements: The nuts are parboiled whole, then halved, and about 2 minutes at a low bubble seems to do the job; I tried 5 minutes first and it was too long. Halving across the equator works better than scar-to-tip. Also, it’s easiest to apply the pliers at an angle.

Whether you start with parboiled peeled or X’d whole; boiling is a misnomer. Whole: Start them in cold water to cover generously, bring it just to the boil, then turn the heat to simmer and cook for 12 to 15 minutes, depending on size and freshness. It’s best to err on the side of undercooking so they don’t crumble when you peel them. Parboiled: Simmer gently for about 5 minutes or  use directly in stew, stir-fry or whatever. Being both skinned and halved, they’re ready to absorb the flavor of whatever they’re cooked in

PEELING

The other half of the royal pain, because whether the chestnut is roasted or boiled, peeling presents the same challenge. There is no getting around the fact that the hotter the chestnut, the easier it is to remove the disagreeable inner skin. It helps to score generously before cooking.

Work with a few at a time, leaving the remainder in the turned-off oven or pot of water. If you hold the nut in a tea towel and use only one hand to work on peel removal, finger burning can be kept to a minimum. This is not a good job for men. Why they’re more sensitive to the heat I don’t know. I only know it’s true and not a cover for weaseling out of being helpful. (It isn’t true for chefs; they have to have abesestos fingers.)

Social Note: According to reports I’ve been unable to verify, people in the rural Midwest and upper South used to employ roasting chestnuts for a kissing game. Cut only a small vent hole in the concave side of each nut and place them in the fire, keeping track of whose is whose. The person whose chestnut pops first gets to kiss whoever they want. Best thing to be doing with your mouth if that’s what you did to your chestnut (see “roasting,” above).

Oh, the stuffing. Don’t be stingy.

*Disclaimer: The folks who own Fante’s are friends. There are many reasons to like them. One of the reasons is that they run a really terrific cookware store.

Wild turkey booking it through the lower garden; she knows what's coming

That discussion was pretty extensive. I have nothing more to add at this time since I haven’t yet made up my mind about whether I want to bone it. (stay tuned)

Thanksgiving tips from around the web:

There’s a nice tip from Kim Severson in today’s obligatory turkey story in the New York Times: cook the extra bread stuffing in heavily buttered muffin tins for a crisp crust and a soft interior. “Let me just say: I rocked the stuffing muffins,” she crows. “Imagine how good they must have been, then times it to the 10th power.”

I totally believe her, though not being as she is constrained by word count will add that I plan to cover the pan so the tops don’t dry out; crust on 3 sides should be sufficient.

A great deal more than you need or want to know about the party-planning aspect, along with the usual stern words about food safety,  is now available here from the ever-helpful USDA.

Nope, this is your warning ( in case you didn’t already know) that elderly Halloween doodads, while not in the league of antique Christmas ornaments, are nevertheless worth more than you might think.

Not always a lot more

Candy container, plastic, from the 1950’s, spotted at a nearby shop

But sometimes, as in this example from the website of Showcase Antiques

“ Composition "Pumpkin Girl" candy container painted in tones of yellow, green, blue, red, and white; marked "Germany;" circa 1910. Height=4.5 Price: $795.00”

In a normal year,  this wouldn’t come up; I’d just be merrily chirping along about how this is a good time to bake

Spicy Walnut Gingerfingers

But I’ve gotten fixated on the depressing news that this year’s spending on Halloween is projected to be only 3 to 4 billion dollars, instead of the 5.8 billion (yes, b as in bilious) spent in 2008, and that as a result the avalanche of Christmas crap will be picking up speed even earlier than usual.

Most of the great collectible stuff was made between roughly 1910 and 1940; plastic and patina are not friends. But online sellers are hawking items made as recently as the 1990’s, so if you are about to celebrate your children’s departure for college by chucking a couple of decades’ worth of All Hallows Detritus, you might want to remember that the worthless schlock of today is – at least potentially – the vintage collectible of tomorrow.

For more on this, much of it quite entertaining, check out Jason Walcott’s Vintage Halloween Pages.

For about 80

GINGERFINGERS

3 ½  c. all-purpose flour

2 generous tsp. ground ginger

1 ½ tsp. cinnamon

½ tsp. salt

pinch each nutmeg and dry mustard

1/2c. honey

3 tbl. Molasses

2/3c. sugar

½ c. butter, cut in 3 or 4 pieces

¼ c. lard or chicken, duck, or bacon fat, or 5 tablespoons more butter

2 tsp. baking soda

1 c. ground walnuts

sliced almonds for decorating

1. Mix the flour with the salt and spices and set aside.

2. Put the honey, molasses, sugar and fats in a kettle or large saucepan and stir over low heat just until the fats melt and mixture is smooth. Don’t let it actually cook. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the soda.

3. Stir in the spiced flour, then work in the walnuts, using your hands if necessary. The dough will be very firm but malleable.

4. Heat the oven to 350. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper and create fingers (see below), keeping them about ½ inch apart. Bake until a bit darker than gold, 12 to 15 minutes or more depending on size. Transfer gently to racks for cooling; they’re soft when they’re hot – as durable as biscotti after they cool.

Shaping:

Pinch off a tablespoon size lump of dough and squeeze it in the crease between your palm and fingers to elongate it into a fat, bumpy rope – or a skinny bumpy torpedo, depending on how you look at it. Place the proto-finger on the paper and fiddle so it’s about 1/3 inch  in diameter and 3 or 4 inches long. Blunt one end and leave the other tapered.

Using a fingertip, moisten the narrow ends of the fingers. Apply sliced almonds to be the nails.

Before

After

Alternative shaping:

The trompe l’oeil fingers are fun but of course somewhat time consuming. Nothing wrong with making a few fingers for the fun of the thing, then slicing a few zillion icebox cookies out of the rest of the dough.

(Recipe originally published last year, shortly before the election when we were all needing something to nibble on to allay nervousness.)