That old chestnut

While the chestnut hot cross buns I made at Easter had been an excellent opportunity to open the tin of chestnut puree I'd had lurking in my cupboard for a while, the recipe had unfortunately only required the use of about half of it. I kept coming across the Tupperware pot containing the rest of the stuff in my fridge, generally looking at the greyish brown mass and wondering what on earth it was, before remembering and telling myself that I really must think of a way of using it before it started to go off...and then forgetting about it all over again.

Thankfully, I did remember to find some ideas for it, ahead of the mould starting to grow. The Merchant Gourmet website, where I had found the bun recipe, had a wealth of other excellent chestnutty suggestions; I was quite drawn to the "No Meat Meatballs" - partly for the name, and partly as it called for green lentils in the recipe. Merchant Gourmet were suggesting a pouch of their own lentils, but it just so happened that I had a tin of organic green bijoux lentils in my stash, crying out to be used (which for once didn't mean rapidly approaching or past their best before date).

Only a few days before my recipe search, the world had received the very sad news of the far-too-early passing of the great Victoria Wood, whose sketches, stand-up and sitcoms I have loved since about the age of 10. One of my favourites, and hence one I'd had on my mind at the time, was the brilliant "Brontëburgers" monologue, in which she played a tour guide at the Brontë family parsonage in Howarth despite having never read any of the books ("I'm more of a Dick Francis nut"), ending with the classic lines "Snacks and light refreshments are available in the Heathcliff Nosher Bar, so do feel free to sample our popular Brontëburgers. Or for the fibre-conscious, our Branwell Brontëburgers".



A Branwell Brontëburger didn't sound a hundred miles away from the sort of thing that might be made from these rather brown-looking lentils and greyish chestnuts, so I decided to adapt the meatball recipe to make burgers instead. I use the term "adapt" loosely - in fact I just mean dividing the mixture up into larger pieces and flattening them into patties, and not making the accompanying garlic, parsley and tomato sauce.

The meat-free meatballs recipe was also quite appropriate given that Victoria Wood was vegetarian herself (and in fact even wrote the foreword to Delia Smith's Vegetarian Collection, which is so typically funny in its gentle mocking of the perils of being veggie in the 70s that it's worth tracking down a copy of the book for that alone).

 

So, I combined chestnut puree, some of the lentils, garlic, egg, breadcrumbs and parsley as per the recipe, plus a few drops of the mustard ketchup I'd had in my fridge for ages, shaped them into four flat burgers and fried them in a pan. When in the supermarket earlier, I had seen some posh brioche-style burger buns on offer - but they didn't quite seem appropriate here; in honour of Victoria, it had to be plain old baps ('If a man dies in India, the widow flings herself on the funeral pyre; in England, she drags herself into the kitchen and says "72 baps, Connie - you slice, I'll spread."') A bit of lettuce, a gherkin and some mustard finished things off nicely.

I must say, these were very good indeed - nothing like eating a beef burger, obviously, but a lot better than some of the veggie burger offerings I have tried in the past. With the extra burst of umami from the mushroom ketchup, you could almost kid yourself that it was some kind of sausagemeat-type substance - almost. But best to think of it as something quite tasty on its own terms, the chestnut providing an earthy flavour and the lentils a nuttiness and extra texture.

My only criticism would have been that they tasted a little too bready - but that was before realising that I'd actually downscaled the quantity of breadcrumbs incorrectly, and added too many. So the breadiness was my fault, not the recipe's.

But that still wasn't all the chestnut puree used. Another recipe on the Merchant Gourmet website that intrigued me was their savoury Chestnut and Stilton Cheesecake. Their version was a large, baked cheesecake, though interestingly still made with a sweet crushed digestive biscuit base. I decided that a smaller, unbaked version would be simpler, so mixed together some puree, stilton and soured cream, and then using an empty tin (which I'd opened both ends of) as a ring mould, packed down the mixture straight onto a whole, uncrushed digestive.

After brief chilling in the fridge, and some extra stilton sprinkled on top, it was ready to eat - and again, not bad at all, despite the somewhat unappealing greyish colour. The chestnut flavour did get a little lost beneath the pungent saltiness of the stilton, but that itself was tempered slightly against the sweetness of the biscuit.



And there was sufficient chestnut puree left for a couple of non-savoury options too. The classic Mont Blanc - sweetened chestnut puree with whipped cream and meringue - would have been a possibility here, were it not for the fact that at the time I lacked any cream or meringue (or the motivation to make my own). So instead I combined chestnut, a little icing sugar and some cocoa powder to make a sort of spread to go on toast, a bit like Nutella, but more subtle, less rich and possibly slightly healthier. "Chestnutella", if you will.

I also consulted one of my favourite food books, Nikki Segnit's marvellous Flavour Thesaurus (have I mentioned this before? If not, go and buy it now; it is a masterpiece), which offers the reader well-known and unusual combinations for 99 different flavours and ingredients, and ideas or recipes for using them together. She explores the chestnut and chocolate combination further, making reference to a dessert served by chef Charles Ranhofer at New York's Delmonico Restaurant in the 19th century, in which chestnut ice-cream was formed into the shape of potatoes, dotted with slivers of almonds for "eyes", and then rolled in cocoa powder to create the illusion of mud. It sounded slightly barmy, but in my mind a perfect use for the very last of the puree. I mixed this with a little condensed milk, sour cream and a splash of rum and stuck it in the freezer - a loose approximation of another of Nigella's churn-free ice cream recipes, like the pumpkin one I did before Christmas last year.

Shaping ice cream into potatoes isn't quite as easy as it sounds, but with some nifty spoon work and some refreezing (as it does start to melt rather quickly), I ended up with something I was pleased enough with, to which almond eyes and cocoa mud were then added. The ice cream itself was really good - a nice balance of sweetness and chestnut flavour, which was enhanced rather than overpowered by the light dusting of cocoa (the chocolate flavour had rather dominated in the Chestnutella) - very tasty indeed.

So, while a dessert in the form of a muddy potato might not appeal to all, it was certainly a spud-i-liked. In fact I thought all the chestnut options were rather good - shame that Merchant Gourmet are no longer producing it in tins, or I might have been tempted to try a few more.