Home › The Principles of Cookery › Oysters, Vol-Au-Vent Of
Oysters, Vol-Au-Vent Of
Put into a basin half a pound of dried and sifted flour, salt it slightly, and make it into a soft paste by stirring into it the yolk of an egg, which has been beaten up with the strained juice of half a lemon and a little cold water. Put the paste on a slab, and lay half a pound of fresh butter in the middle of it, then roll it out four or five times, and put it in a cold place for an hour. At the end of that time roll it out again once or twice, and leave it a little more than an inch thick. Dip a knife into hot water, and cut the paste to the size and shape of the dish on which the vol-au-vent is to be served. Mark the cover by making an even incision the third of an inch deep, and an inch from the edge all round, brush it over with yolk of egg, place it on a baking-tin, and bake it in a hot oven until it is well risen, and lightly browned. Draw it out, and lift off the cover with the point of a sharp knife, scoop out the soft paste from the inside, and return the vol-au-vent to the oven for a few minutes to dry. When ready for serving, fill the centre with oysters prepared as follows. Beard two dozen oysters, and put the beards and the liquor into a saucepan with an inch of lemon-rind, a small pinch of salt, half an inch of mace, half a grain of cayenne, and the tenth part of a nutmeg, grated. Boil quickly for six or eight minutes, then strain the gravy. Mix a table-spoonful of flour smoothly with two ounces of butter. Add a quarter of a pint of cream and the oyster liquor, and simmer gently until the sauce is smooth and thick. Put in the oysters, simmer two or three seconds only, and serve. Time, about half an hour to bake the vol-au-vent; twenty minutes to prepare the oysters. Probable cost, 5s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
Two separate operations that meet at the last minute: a full puff paste case, and a bearded-oyster ragout. The oysters are the fragile part and the book is right to give them only seconds.
- The hinge: barely cook the oystersThe oysters go into the finished sauce and stay there two or three seconds — long enough to heat through, no longer. Any real simmering shrinks them and turns them to erasers. Have the vol-au-vent hot and on the dish before the oysters go in.
- Oven temperatureThe book says only 'a hot oven'. For puff paste that is usually taken to mean somewhere around 425-450F. Start high so the water in the butter layers flashes to steam and lifts the paste; if the case is browning too fast before it has risen, lower the heat to finish drying the inside.
- The paste is a 1:1 puffHalf a pound of flour to half a pound of butter is the classic equal-weight puff paste. 'Roll it out four or five times' is most naturally read as four or five turns, though the book does not describe the fold, and the hour in a cold place firms the butter between rollings.
- An inch thick is not a misprintThe case is cut from a single slab a little over an inch deep, with the lid scored a third of an inch down and an inch in from the edge. Modern shortcut versions stack rings of thinner paste; the original method gives you a straight-sided case and a proper lid.
- Liquid measuresA quarter of a pint here is an imperial quarter-pint, 5 imperial fl oz or about 140 ml, so a little over half a US cup of cream. The oyster liquor is whatever the two dozen yield; the recipe does not measure it.
- Spice quantities"Half a grain of cayenne" is literally about 30 mg — read it as a scant pinch. "Half an inch of mace" means a piece of blade mace, not ground; a scant quarter-teaspoon of ground mace substitutes. The tenth of a nutmeg is a few scrapes.
- BeardingThe beards are the frilly gills and dark mantle trim. They are cut away because they stay tough, but they carry flavour, which is why they are boiled with the liquor and then strained out. Buy oysters live in the shell and shuck them yourself; the liquor is half the sauce.
- Yield and costThe book gives it as sufficient for four or five persons. Five shillings was a substantial sum for a single dish at the date of Cassell's.
Vol-au-vent means roughly "flight in the wind", a name for a paste case light enough to seem weightless; it is generally traced to the early nineteenth-century Parisian kitchens and often specifically credited to Antonin Carême, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. It appears in Cassell's as an entry titled "Oysters, Vol-Au-Vent Of", in keeping with the book's alphabetical arrangement. A raised puff case tests laminating, oven management and timing all at once. The choice of oysters says something about the period too — in late Victorian Britain oysters were still an everyday shellfish, and pairing them with cream and blade mace raised no eyebrows. Overfishing of the native beds through the following decades is what turned a filling like this from a household dish into an expensive one.