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Vol Au Vent of Chicken
Make rich puff paste and stand on ice all night. The r t morning roll out a third of an inch thick. Cut out as many cakes as are required, with a tin circular cutter, Take a second cutter an inch smaller, press into the tops of the little patties, allowing it to sink half way through the crusts; brush the tops with beaten egg. Put on ice and let stand until very cold, then put in a hot oven and bake. When done remove the pieces marked out with a sharp pen knife. Scrape out the center, and fill with nicely cooked chicken, seasoned as you would for chicken salad. Set away until ready to serve.
A cold patty-shell filling exercise more than a cooked dish: the pastry does the work, and the chicken goes in already cooked and dressed. Three things decide whether it succeeds — the pastry must be genuinely cold going into the oven, the oven genuinely hot, and the filling added only after the shells have cooled.
- The hinge: cold paste, hot ovenPuff pastry rises because the water in the chilled butter layers flashes to steam faster than the fat can melt out. Warm dough in a moderate oven gives a greasy, squat shell. Chill the cut rounds until firm and bake at 425–450F.
- "Cakes" means roundsHere a cake is simply a disc cut with a round cutter, not a sweet. Cut straight down and do not twist the cutter, which seals the layered edges and stops the rise.
- The inner cutterPressing a smaller cutter halfway through scores the lid, so that after baking the centre lifts out cleanly and leaves a well. Modern versions do the same thing; the recipe's half-depth score is deeper than some cooks use, but it is what is called for here.
- Egg wash placementBrush only the top surface. Egg running down the cut sides glues the layers together and the shell will not lift evenly.
- Thickness and sizeA third of an inch is roughly 8 mm, thicker than puff pastry is usually rolled today, and correct here -- the shell needs height to hold filling. A pound of pastry cut with a 3-inch cutter will give somewhere around ten patties, depending on how much of the trim you are willing to re-roll.
- "Seasoned as you would for chicken salad"In a book of this date that means diced cooked chicken bound with mayonnaise or a boiled dressing, with salt, pepper, and often celery. The recipe gives no quantities; about 2 cups of diced chicken to half a cup of dressing fills a dozen shells.
- Assemble lateMayonnaise-dressed chicken in a warm shell goes oily and the pastry softens within the hour. Bake and cool the shells, keep the filling refrigerated, and fill shortly before serving. The original's 'set away until ready to serve' presumably assumed somewhere cool.
- Ready-made pastryAn all-butter frozen puff pastry, rolled to the stated thickness and re-chilled, behaves the same way and spares the overnight rest the original assumes.
Vol-au-vent — "flight in the wind" — is a French name for a puff-pastry case, generally credited in kitchen tradition to the early nineteenth-century Paris pastry trade and to Carême's circle, though the attribution is repeated more often than it is documented. By 1900 the form had thoroughly crossed into American and British household cookery, where it usually appears, as here, in miniature: individual patty shells rather than the large single case a French kitchen would build. The filling reflects the same domestication. A classic vol-au-vent is filled hot, with a creamed ragout; this one is filled cold with dressed chicken, which is to say with chicken salad, then the reigning dish of American luncheons, teas and receptions. That combination — a French pastry shell, an American salad — is exactly the kind of compromise a turn-of-the-century household book was written to teach, letting a cook with an ordinary kitchen put something on the buffet table that looked like it came from a caterer.