Cunningham Marron Glace

For Christmas, Sylvia and Edward wanted consumables, so they wouldn't have to carry it back to Scotland. She added that she loves Marrons Glacés, which you can only get during Christmas time. Will and I hopped online--cuz you can get anything online--and started looking at the cost of Marrons Glacés. Um, yeah. $80 for 12? $45 for 6? Just what were these glazed chestnuts made of? Surely candied chestnuts can't be that expensive or that hard to make. And so we attempted them ourselves.

First we started with these ingredients:

1 kilo chestnuts, shell and membrane removed

1 kilo sugar

650 ml. water (+-2-1/2 US cups)

1 vanilla bean

First we scored and peeled off the leathery shell of the chestnuts. This is not an easy or quick process. It took us about 45 minutes, with a few expletives, curses for the French who invented this candy, and bleeding thumbs.

Once we had all the chestnuts husked, we boiled them for the required 8 minutes. When/if we do this again, we will boil them longer. The nut needs to have been softened by the boil in order to have soak up the sugar.

After the boil, you are supposed to simply roll them in a kitchen towel and the furry hull will come off. What they don't tell you is, that the hull comes off only when the nut is rocket hot. Once it cools down, you have to tweeze out the hull from all the cracks and crevices that the chestnut has.

This is not efficient or fun and caused more cursing of the French and the conclusion that people in hell make these for people in heaven. So, we heated them again. This made a huge difference--with the hot nut, the hull came off, usually in one piece.

In the meantime, we have boiled & simmered the sugar, water, and a vanilla bean together for about 5 minutes.

Then we added the chestnuts and brought it back to a boil for 10 minutes.

Once it has boiled, you remove the vanilla bean and you take the pot off the burner and let it sit over night/12 hours at least. In the morning, you bring it back to a boil, boiling for one minute longer and then letting it sit again for 24 hours. According to the recipe we were using, the exact procedure is:

Now, cover and allow to steep over night or at least 12 hours. *Bring again to the boil and cook 1 minute more. Again allow to stand this time for 24 hours*. Repeat again from * to * until all the syrup has been absorbed (shouldn't take more than 3-4 times). Cooking over the time may inhibit the crystallization process - which is dependent on the above steps.

We boiled and steeped them for 5 days because not all the sugar had been absorbed. Then we pulled out the gooey nuts and put them on parchment paper and dried them in the oven for about two hours at 140* F.

When we pulled them out and we had Marrons Glacés.

Will and I, having never had them, asked Sylvia to be the expert taster. She concluded that while they were tasty, we had it wrong because the nuts was hard in the center. She opened the jar of real Marrons Glacés we purchased for her Christmas present as a back up should this experiment not work out and we saw that the nut had really become almost jelly-like.

But we all decided that our Marrons Glacés tasted better.

However, one of the glorious outcomes is that we dried the left over sugar mixture too and they taste even better than the Marrons Glacés, as it is pure sugar and vanilla with a hint of chestnut.

Next time (and yes, there will be a next time), we will boil the nuts longer in the beginning so the center becomes soft and we will not boil/steep them 5 times. We did this because the recipe suggested that all the sugar would be absorbed into the nuts. For ours, it wasn't even close to being gone. We thought that one more boil/steep might do the trick and instead it did crystallize the sugar and broke down the nuts into bits.

In the end, after 6 days to make these, we have conclude that $80 for 12 candied chestnuts is totally worth it. And the French devised this recipe specifically to taunt the English.