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Vol-Au-Vents, Orange
Prepare the vol-au-vents, and bake them in the usual way. Let them get cold. Pare the rind very thinly from three or four large oranges, put it into a saucepan with four ounces of loaf sugar and half a pint of water, and boil to a clear syrup. Strip the white skin from the oranges, remove the pips, and divide the fruit into quarters. Thicken the syrup by pouring it when boiling upon a dessert-spoonful of arrow-root which has been mixed smoothly with a little cold water, and stirring it well. Add a little brandy and two or three drops of cochineal, and pour the syrup upon the fruit. When cold it will be ready for the vol-au-vents.
A cold sweet vol-au-vent: puff pastry cases filled with orange segments in a thickened, brandied syrup. The whole thing hinges on keeping the two elements apart until the last moment.
- Fill at the last minuteBaked puff pastry begins to soften within minutes of meeting a wet filling. Have the cases and the syrupy fruit both cold, and spoon the filling in just before it goes to the table.
- "Bake them in the usual way"Cassell's assumes you know the puff-pastry method: roll out, cut rounds, mark an inner lid, and bake in a hot oven until risen and dry through, then lift out the soft centre. The book gives no thickness, temperature or timing here, and does not say how many cases this quantity of fruit will fill.
- Half a pintThis is a British book, so half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 cups. Four ounces of loaf sugar is a scant 2/3 cup of granulated; loaf sugar was simply refined sugar sold in a cone and broken up, with no flavour difference from what you buy now.
- A dessert-spoonfulTwo teaspoons of arrowroot, mixed to a thin cream with cold water. Pour the boiling syrup onto it as directed and stir off the heat; arrowroot sets almost at once and thins again if it is boiled hard afterwards.
- CochinealTwo or three drops of the old red colouring, extracted from scale insects and sold as a liquid. Modern carmine or any red food colouring does the same job, and the dish is no worse for being left the colour of oranges.
- Paring the rindTake the zest in wide strips with a peeler and leave every trace of white behind, or the syrup turns bitter. The strips flavour the syrup and are usually lifted out before thickening, though the recipe does not say so.
- The fruitThree or four large oranges, stripped of white skin and pips and divided into quarters as the recipe directs; pull away the membrane if you want it cleaner. Any sweet orange works, and the recipe leaves the quantity of brandy to the cook.
Vol-au-vent means "flight in the wind", a name traditionally credited to the pastry cooks of early nineteenth-century Paris and often attributed to Carême, for a case so light it seemed ready to blow away. By the time Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery was compiled in the 1870s the form had been thoroughly domesticated in Britain and appears in a range of variations, most of them savoury - oysters, sweetbreads, chicken - with a short tail of sweet versions like this one, filled with fruit in a glossy thickened syrup and served cold at the end of a meal. The arrowroot and the cochineal both point to the period: arrowroot was the fashionable clear-setting starch of Victorian invalid and dessert cookery, and a few drops of red colouring finish the pale sweet dish.