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Chestnuts Au Jus

Chestnuts au Jus is chestnuts simmered in a browned sugar and butter glaze.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and chestnut work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 647 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Chestnuts Au Jus

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chestnuts

  1. Remove the outer skin from the chestnuts.

  2. Place the chestnuts in boiling water to help remove the inner skin.

  3. Transfer the chestnuts to cold water while preparing the glaze.

Make the glaze

  1. In a saucepan, stir together the sugar and butter until the sugar is browned.

  2. Let the mixture boil, then add a little cold water.

Simmer and serve

  1. Add the chestnuts to the saucepan and simmer until tender, avoiding shaking them.

  2. Just before serving, add a few spoonfuls of glaze.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + chestnuttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together647 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Butter + chestnuttop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together965 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Browns in the butter to form the caramel glaze that gives the chestnuts flavour and colour.
Butter
Melts with the sugar to form the glaze, adding richness and fat to the coating.
Chestnuts
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender as they simmer in the glaze.

The step that matters

Browning the sugar and butter. Sugar darkens quickly once it starts to colour, so it can turn bitter if overcooked. Stopping at a light brown keeps the glaze sweet and balanced.

Swap the chestnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pecansfits better
  3. Filbertfits about as well
  4. Chestnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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