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Vol-Au-Vents, Green Gooseberry
Prepare some small vol-au-vents in the usual way, and bake them. Take off the covers, scoop out the inside, and let them get cold. When wanted, fill them with a compote of green gooseberries. Place the covers upon them, or, if preferred, put a little whipped cream, or Devonshire cream, in their places; serve on a neatly-folded napkin. The gooseberries may be prepared as follows. Top and tail a pint of green gooseberries, and put them into boiling water for two minutes, then throw them into cold water with which has been mixed a table-spoonful of vinegar (this is to restore their colour). Boil six ounces of refined sugar in half a pint of water for ten minutes, put in the gooseberries, and let them simmer gently till tender but unbroken. Strain them, and if necessary put the syrup back again, and let it boil a few minutes till it is very thick, then pour it over the fruit. When cold it will be ready for the vol-au-vents. Time, ten to fifteen minutes to simmer the gooseberries.
A Victorian assembly job: puff pastry cases baked blind, filled at the last moment with a syrupy compote of hard green gooseberries. The whole thing hinges on keeping the fruit whole.
- Keep the gooseberries below a boilGreen gooseberries hold their shape only if the syrup barely trembles. Once it reaches a rolling boil the skins split and the compote turns to fool. Ten to fifteen minutes at the faintest simmer, uncovered, watching them.
- Imperial measuresCassell's pints are 20 fl oz. Half a pint of water is about 1¼ US cups; 6 oz refined sugar is a scant cup (about 170 g). A pint of gooseberries measured by volume is roughly 12 oz / 340 g of fruit.
- "In the usual way"Puff pastry rolled to about ½ inch, cut in rounds of 2-3 inches with a smaller round scored partway through for the lid. The book gives no oven temperature; a hot oven of roughly 425F for 15-20 minutes, until risen and dry through, is the modern equivalent, after which you lift off the cap and pull out the soft centre.
- Fill cold, and lateBoth the cases and the compote must be cold, and the two should meet no more than half an hour before serving. Syrup soaks pastry fast; a filled vol-au-vent left standing collapses.
- The vinegarA tablespoon of vinegar in the cooling water is an acid dip which the book says is "to restore their colour". Whether it does anything is doubtful: acid tends to dull green rather than set it, and the short blanch and quick chill are the more likely reason the fruit stays bright.
- Devonshire creamClotted cream, sold in tubs in Britain and available by mail order elsewhere. Whipped cream is the stated alternative and is the better foil for very tart fruit.
- Green gooseberriesThese are unripe, hard and sour, picked in late spring or early summer — not the soft dessert gooseberries of high summer. Ripe red or amber fruit will not hold together and gives a different, sweeter dish; frozen fruit softens and splits, so it is a poor choice where the berries must stay whole.
- YieldA pint of fruit will fill something like ten small cases, enough for four to six as a dessert course.
Vol-au-vent — "flight in the wind", for pastry so light it might blow away — is a French invention of the early nineteenth century, generally credited by tradition to Carême's kitchen, and it reached English cookery books as a savoury case for salpicons of chicken, oyster or sweetbread. Turning it out sweet, and filling it with green gooseberries, is a thoroughly British adaptation: hard unripe gooseberries were a spring standby in a country where they grew in every garden and where the fruit was picked young by necessity, thinning the bushes for the later crop. The instruction to "prepare some small vol-au-vents in the usual way" tells you how much puff pastry was simply assumed in a late-Victorian kitchen.