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VOL-AU-VENTS, SWEET (a la Parisienne)
Make a few small vol-au-vents, and have some good jam or stewed fruit ready to fill them. As soon as they are taken from the oven, sprinkle finely-powdered white sugar thickly on the edges, and hold a red-hot shovel over them till the sugar melts. Fill them with the fruit, pile whipped cream on the top, and serve. Time, ten or twelve minutes to bake the vol-au-vents.
A late-Victorian assembly recipe that assumes you already have puff pastry and a coal fire. Two things need translating: the oven heat, which the original omits entirely, and the red-hot shovel.
- The hinge: fill at the last momentPastry cases and wet fruit are enemies. Glaze and cool the shells, then fill and crown with cream only as they go to the table, or the bases turn to paste.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives a time but no temperature. Small puff cases need a hot oven, 425-450F, to lift and set the layers; ten to twelve minutes suits cases of the small size the recipe implies. Larger ones will want longer, with the heat dropped once risen.
- The red-hot shovelThis is a domestic salamander: a heated iron held close above sugar to caramelise it without further baking the pastry. An overhead broiler set high, or a small kitchen blowtorch, does the same work with better control. Watch continuously, as powdered sugar goes from melted to burnt in seconds.
- "Finely-powdered white sugar"Sugar pounded fine from the loaf; caster sugar is the closest modern match, and it caramelises more evenly and is less inclined to scorch than icing sugar. Modern icing sugar contains cornstarch, which can dull the glaze.
- Vol-au-vent casesFrozen all-butter puff pastry is entirely adequate. Cut rounds, mark an inner circle two-thirds of the way through to form the lid, chill well, and bake from cold; well-chilled pastry going into a hot oven gives the best lift, the rise itself coming from steam trapped between the layers.
- The filling"Good jam" of the period was stiff and very sweet. Thick fruit preserve, or stewed fruit reduced until it mounds on a spoon, will hold; a loose compote runs out and soaks the shell.
- Whipped creamCream then was unpasteurised. Use double or heavy cream whipped to soft peaks, lightly sweetened; the sugared edge is already doing a good deal of the sweetening.
- YieldA 320g sheet of puff pastry gives roughly eight to ten small cases, enough for four as a dessert.
Vol-au-vent means "flight in the wind", a name generally traced to the pastry's near-weightless rise, and the form is credited by tradition to the great Parisian pastry cooks of the early nineteenth century, Carême among them. By the time Cassell's dictionary appeared, the case was a familiar item in the household repertoire, turned to savoury use at dinner or, as here, filled with jam and cream for a sweet course. The red-hot shovel is the real period detail, and a reminder that the Victorian kitchen range gave a cook a supply of hot iron that no modern kitchen has; glazing, browning and caramelising were all done with metal taken straight from the fire.