Home › The Principles of Cookery › Rhubarb Vol-Au-Vent
Rhubarb Vol-Au-Vent
In the spring of the year this makes a very inviting and wholesome dish, and its qualities purify the blood, which the winter's food has rendered gross. Cut about twelve sticks of rhubarb into lengths of one inch, put the fruit into a stewpan holding about two quarts, put over it a quarter of a pound of sugar, and a table-spoonful of water, set it on a sharp fire, stirring it; do not let it get brown, or it will spoil and lose its flavour; it will take but a few minutes to do. When tender, put it into a basin to cool; a few minutes before serving, fill the volau-vent with it, and serve cold.
The recipe assumes you already have a baked vol-au-vent case to hand — Cassell's treats the pastry as a separate operation elsewhere in the book. What follows here is really a stiff rhubarb compote and the timing of its assembly.
- The hinge: fill at the last momentThe instruction to fill the case "a few minutes before serving" is the point of the timing. Rhubarb throws off a great deal of juice, and puff pastry filled in advance will soften.
- QuantityTwelve sticks of rhubarb is roughly 1.5 to 2 lb trimmed, depending on how thick the stalks are; forced rhubarb tends to be slimmer than most supermarket stalks. Weigh rather than count, and aim for about 1.5 lb.
- SugarA quarter of a pound is 4 oz (about 115 g), a generous half cup, which is modest for that weight of fruit. Early forced rhubarb takes it well; late-season field rhubarb is sharper and will want more. Taste while it is still warm.
- "A sharp fire"Medium-high heat on a modern hob. The single tablespoon of water is deliberate: the fruit is meant to collapse in its own juice, not poach, so the mixture stays thick enough to sit in pastry.
- Do not let it brownSugar and rhubarb juice in a shallow pan will catch quickly once the liquid reduces. Stir constantly and pull it off the heat the moment the pieces are tender but still holding their shape — three to five minutes, not longer, or you have purée.
- The stewpanA two-quart stewpan is roughly a 2 to 2.3 litre saucepan. Use something with a heavy base and a non-reactive surface; rhubarb is acidic enough to pick up a metallic taste from bare aluminium or cast iron.
- Stalks onlyRhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid in quantity and are not edible. Trim them off and discard, along with any dried or split ends of stalk.
- YieldThe recipe does not state the size of the case; this quantity of fruit will fill a large one. Any compote left over keeps several days covered in the refrigerator.
The opening claim — that spring rhubarb "purifies the blood, which the winter's food has rendered gross" — is not a culinary note but a medical one, and it explains why the dish is in the book at all. Rhubarb came to Britain as a drug long before it came as a fruit: the dried root was a well-established purgative in the apothecary's trade, and the notion that the first green things of spring corrected a winter diet of salt meat and root vegetables was common household wisdom through the nineteenth century. Rhubarb as a sweetened dessert fruit was a comparatively late arrival, spreading in the early 1800s, and forced rhubarb grown under cover gave cooks something tender in March and April when little other fruit existed. The vol-au-vent — French for "flight in the wind", generally traced to the puff-pastry work of early nineteenth-century Parisian pâtissiers — was by Cassell's day a standard piece of any ambitious English kitchen's repertoire, filled with whatever the season offered, savoury or sweet.