Nigel Slater’s recipes for red leaves, warm cheese and chestnuts, and for chocolate chestnut cake | Food
Chestnuts are here: dark, plump and shiny – and flat on one side from where they have snuggled together in their spiky green cases. Sweet chestnuts grew in the woods near my childhood home. I’d squirrel them away in my duffel-coat pockets on the walk home from school. We roasted them over the fire, the occasional one cracking like a whip, sending out a spray of nut shrapnel.
Better, I think, is to roast them in an oven. A deep cross on their rounded side will stop them exploding and expose their flesh to the heat. This is how I cook them for eating as they are, not worrying about removing the brown skin. They are hard work, though, if you intend to purée them or use them in a dessert. I always turn to the ready-made purée and vacuum-packed whole nuts. They can be folded into a Christmas nut loaf, tossed with the aromatics of a pot-roast bird or into the filling of a chocolate tart or cake.
Chestnut purée may not be much to look at, but introduce enough icing sugar, meringue and melted chocolate and you have one of the world’s classic marriages. It saves a lot of work for the cook. I wait each year for new season’s marrons glacés, with their fudgy texture, hoar-frost coating and origami-style gold wrappers. I’m hoping for some in my stocking.
Chestnut leaves are long and slim with edges like the teeth of a saw, and are often used for wrapping goat’s cheese. You can bake one whole, in its leaf, then unwrap it and watch the molten cheese ooze out. You’ll need crisp toast on the side or slices of russet apple, toasted nuts and a cluster of bitter leaves.
Red leaves, warm cheese and chestnuts
Find the small cheeses wrapped in fig leaves for this if you can. Or use kitchen foil to wrap your cheeses instead. Serves 4
chestnuts 200g
goat’s cheeses 4, about 80g each in weight
treviso, radicchio and other red chicory 100g in total
pears 200g
beetroot 1, small and raw
red wine vinegar 2 tbsp
garlic 1 small clove
olive oil 3 tbsp
Dijon mustard 1 tsp
Cut a cross on…
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