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Fruit, Vol-Au-Vent Of
This is an exceedingly delicate branch of cookery, and requires much skill and care. A vol-au-vent should be made of French puff paste (see PUFF PASTE, FRENCH). Brush the paste over with lemon-juice before folding for the last time. Roll out to the desired thickness, and place the paste on a baking-tin. Cut into shape with a tin-cutter or plate, and brush the centre with white of egg, leaving a margin all round unmoistened, that it may rise the better. Make a deep incision, an inch from the edge, in a circular form; separate the edges well, without cutting quite through, and put the paste to rise in a good brisk oven. When sufficiently risen, lift off the middle portion that was marked out, and scoop out the dough, with-cut cutting quite through or injuring the edge. Fill the hollow with bread, and put the vol-au-vent again into the oven. Brush over with egg, and cover with sifted sugar; when done, take out the bread, and put strawberries or raspberries, beaten up and mixed with pounded sugar, on the inside of the vol-au-vent. Serve with whipped cream over the top. Time, to bake, three-quarters of an hour.
A sweet vol-au-vent is puff pastry engineering first and dessert second: the case is built, hollowed and dried out, then filled at the last possible moment. Everything hinges on keeping the risen wall intact.
- The hinge: cut the lid, not through itThe circular incision an inch from the edge must stop well short of the base, and the egg wash must stay off the outer margin. Wash on the cut edge glues the layers together and the wall will not lift.
- "A good brisk oven"425-450F. Puff paste needs that initial blast to turn its water to steam and drive the layers apart; a moderate oven gives a squat, greasy case.
- The forty-five minutesThree-quarters of an hour is most likely the total for both bakings rather than a single stint, though the recipe does not say how it divides, and it gives no direction to change the heat for the second.
- Why the bread goes inThe bread is a blind-baking support, holding the walls upright while the case dries. Crumpled foil or baking beans in a paper liner does the same job and is easier to remove cleanly.
- Sugar under the grill of the ovenSugar glaze -- The egg-and-sifted-sugar glaze will catch quickly at this heat. The recipe applies it during the second baking; watch it, as caramelised is good and scorched is not.
- "Beaten up" fruitCrushed, not pureed. Mash the berries roughly with caster sugar (about 2 tablespoons per pound) and let them stand 15 minutes to draw out juice.
- Fill at the tableJuicy fruit will soften a dried case within minutes. Have the case, the fruit and the whipped cream ready separately and assemble as it goes out.
- Lemon juice in the pasteThe acid relaxes the gluten so the dough rolls without fighting back. Here it is brushed over the paste before the last fold rather than worked into the dough, so the amount involved is small and it does not affect the flavour.
- YieldA single case cut to a 7-8 inch plate serves six to eight, cut in wedges.
Vol-au-vent means "flight in the wind", a name that describes the point of the thing: a shell of puff pastry so light it seems to weigh nothing. It is generally traced to the early nineteenth-century French kitchen and to Antonin Carême's circle, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented, and the technique of building a raised pastry case is older than the name. In Victorian and Edwardian English cookery the vol-au-vent was more often savoury — filled with oysters, sweetbreads, chicken in béchamel — though sweet fruit versions such as this one do appear in the period's books. The writer's opening warning that it "requires much skill and care" reflects a period when a cook's competence with French puff paste was a mark of professional standing, and the shell was a display of that skill as much as a container for anything.