The Superlative Nesselrode

The Nesselrode forms what seems to most contemporary diners as an unholy alliance of custard, chestnuts, glace cherries, candied orange peel, sultanas, currants, liquor and cream. Since five of the major ingredients figure prominently in the preparation of the world's most universally detested sweet, fruitcake, we had our reservations about the Nesselrode. Foods, like most things, have fads, and palates change over time. Things candied and glaced no longer evoke the same appreciative response they once did.

Putting reservations aside, I scoured my library of cookbooks for the recipe in question. I found not one, but five recipes, each, of course, slightly different. Some called for fresh chestnuts, others for paste, and one for pureed marrons glace. All of them called for candied orange rind, one of those items you just can't buy. So even before I decided on a recipe, I devoted an evening to making a cupful of candied peel.

Candied Orange Peel
Remove the rind from two medium oranges in large sections. Grate the exterior surface of the rind slightly to activate the oils, then slice it into long thin strips (you should have about a cup.) Put it in a small heavy saucepan and cover with 3/4 cup cold water. Bring it slowly to a boil, then simmer for ten minutes. Drain the peel well, then repeat this process three to five times. Make a syrup of 1/4 cup water and 1/2 cup sugar. Add the peel and boil over a low flame until the syrup is absorbed and the peel is transparent. Roll the blazing hot strips in powdered sugar and dry on racks. Don't leave the peel to cool in the pan; you'll never get it out.

With the peel question settled, I continued to compare the recipes at hand. All of them called for at least one, and often two, kinds of wine or liquor, either Maraschino, Malaga, Marsala or Madeira (anything sweetish beginning with M?) I decided to play slightly with the recipe in that gorgeous tome, Dining With Proust by Annel Borrel, Alain Senderens and Jean-Bernard Naudin, largely because the photograph was so impressive, but I substituted Marsala for Malaga because I had it, and made that once-in-a-decade investment in a bottle of Maraschino.

The Nesselrode was a two-day event, not counting the evening of the orange peel. On the first day, the recipe is assembled and packed into a mold, then frozen for at least 24 hours. On the second day it is unmolded, garnished, and in the case of this Nesselrode, sketched. This was the process:

Nesselrode Pudding (Chestnut Pudding)
1/2 cup chestnut puree
1/4 cup crystallized cherries
1/2 cup candied orange peel
1/2 cup Marsala
1/2 cup each currants and sultanas
1 dessertspoon ( big splash) Maraschino
2 cups whipping cream
Custard:
2 cups milk
5 eggs
3/4 cup sugar

Dice glaceed and candied things into bits and macerate them in the Marsala. Wash the currants and sultanas and soak them in warm water; when it's time to use them drain them well and dry them thoroughly in a clean dish towel, if you have any, or paper towels. In a heavy bottomed saucepan, heat the milk slowly until it boils. Separate the eggs. Reserve the whites for a chemistry experiment in the back of the refrigerator; place the yolks in a bowl and add the sugar, beating vigorously until the mixture is light and frothy, which takes some doing. By then the milk should be boiling. Pour it over the mixture in the bowl, then return the contents of the bowl to the saucepan. Stir religiously, scraping all the corners and cook over low heat until the custard thickens. Strain the custard through a seive. Mix the chestnut puree, the Maraschino and the custard together well, then add the candied things and the raisinoids. Whip the cream until it is very stiff, and fold it carefully into the mixture. Pour it into a charlotte mold (I used a 2-quart plastic tub) lined with waxed paper. Cover tightly with foil and freeze for 24 hours.

In this process I dirtied 18 pots, bowls, sieves, meauring devices and other implements, and took up an entire afternoon. The ingredients (including the decade's supply of Maraschino) cost about $40.00; of course I have enough left to make several more Nesselrodes, oh joy.

The following evening a small crowd gathered around the kitchen table for the Nesselrode experience, foreshadowed by Candied Peel Night and the kitchen-wasting assembly procedure of the day before. I whipped up some creme chantilly for the garnish, scrubbed the rust out of the pastry tube's nozzle, and unmolded the beast. I crowned it with a big pouf of cream and an obligatory glace cherry on top. At the base I alternated cream starbursts and cherry halves, and applied rows of sultanas down the sides, but I didn't obsess about the garnish too much becuase I feared it would melt before my resident food artist, Miss Mercedes, could capture it on paper.

Once drawn, the Nesselrode was quartered (well, sliced.) Much to my surprise, it wasn't too bad; the one person who actually liked the Maraschino even said it was delicious, and had two helpings, which he later regretted. The bland smoothness of the cream and chestnuts did something to diffuse the sweet sweet of the cherries and the tang of the peel; there was something of that fruitcake sensibility, but with plenty of creaminess to make it go down.

Perhaps there was something in the utter fussiness of the endeavor, in the painstaking application of garnish, in the unmolding itself, that generated so much enthusiasm among the audience. In the unmolding overture to the garnishing, I used the method recommended by one source, covering the inverted mold with hot towels. Six perfectly intelligent people watched with something like rapt attention from the hot towel application to the dissection, and spoke of the event as some kind of rite of passage. They spoke of time having a new demarcation, before and after Nesselrode. As initiates they were now Nesselrodees or Nesselrodsters, depending on who you asked.

On the whole, my conclusion is that the Nesselrode, for all the comment it aroused, was not worth the extreme number of hours required to prepare it. The indisputable proof of this assumption is that the last of the frozen pudding is still in our freezer; if it were really rhapsodically delicious it would have been eaten by now.

What do I see? A Nesselrode pudding! As well! I declare I shall need a course at Carlsbad after such a Lucullan-feast as this.


-Within a Budding Grove