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Vol-Au-Vent, with Cream
Bake six or eight small vol-au-vents; take off the covers, scoop out the insides, dry the cases, and let them become quite cold. Fill them with rich jam, or with fresh fruit stewed in a thick syrup, and place upon the top some nicely-flavoured whipped cream. Garnish the edges of the vol-au-vents with dots of bright-coloured fruit jelly.
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A sweet assembly rather than a bake: the only cooking is the pastry itself, and everything depends on the cases being bone dry and fully cold before they are filled.
- The hinge: dry, cold casesFill warm or slightly damp cases and the pastry turns to paste within minutes. After scooping out the soft interior, return the cases to a 250-275F oven for 10 minutes to dry the walls, then cool completely on a rack.
- Buying the pastryThe book gives no pastry method at all and assumes you raise your own puff paste. All-butter frozen puff, rolled to about 1/4 inch and cut with a 2 to 2 1/2 inch cutter with a smaller cutter scored halfway through for the lid, gives a comparable result. Bake at 425F for 15-20 minutes until fully risen and coloured through.
- "Covers"The cover is the scored central disc, which lifts off as a lid once baked. The recipe says only to take them off; it does not say whether they are set back on or discarded, since the cream goes on the top and the jelly round the edges.
- Thick syrup means thickFruit stewed in a thin syrup will weep straight into the pastry. Cook the fruit down until the syrup coats a spoon, then cool it before it goes anywhere near the case.
- Flavouring the cream"Nicely-flavoured" in this period usually meant vanilla, a little sherry or maraschino, or ratafia. Sweeten lightly, since the jam is already sweet, and whip only to soft peaks so it holds a spoon shape without going grainy.
- The jelly dotsRedcurrant or quince jelly, warmed just enough to fall from a spoon tip, sets into clean beads as it cools. Warmed too far it runs down the sides.
- Assemble at the last momentCases can be baked and dried a day ahead and kept airtight. Fill, pipe and dot within half an hour of serving.
- YieldSix to eight small cases serve six to eight as a dessert, or make part of a larger sweet course.
Vol-au-vent means "flight in the wind", a name generally credited to the lightness of the puff-pastry shell and traditionally associated with the early nineteenth-century Parisian kitchen of Antonin Careme, though the attribution is repeated more often than it is documented. In Victorian and Edwardian British cookery the case became a piece of standard equipment rather than a dish in itself: the same shell carried oyster ragout, sweetbreads, chicken in bechamel, or, as here, jam and whipped cream. The entry gives no pastry method at all, assuming the cook already had puff paste in hand and needed only to be told what to do with the shells.