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Four Cockscombs
دو A few quenelles of Veal or Chicken.
Stir this over the fire until hot, but not boiling; fill in yourvol-au-vent, which should only be done on sending it to table, as it makes the paste damp, and does not appear so satisfactory when filled long before serving; put a lid of pastry on the top and serve.
This is the tail end of a longer recipe — the page opens mid-sentence, with the four cockscombs of the title and the rest of the garnish listed above it in the book. What survives here is the finishing method for a filled vol-au-vent, and the instructions in it are the part that actually decides whether the dish works.
- The hinge: hot, not boilingThe recipe does not say what the filling is bound with, but a boiled white sauce of this kind will split and the quenelles toughen. Bring it just to steaming and hold it below a simmer.
- Fill at the last momentThe warning is sound and worth obeying. A baked puff-pastry case holds its crispness for only a few minutes once wet filling goes in, so bake the case ahead, keep it warm and dry, and fill it on the way to the table.
- CockscombsThe combs of the bird, blanched, peeled of their outer skin, then simmered in a white blanc until tender — a standard classical garnish and no longer sold in most countries. Poached button mushroom caps or small artichoke bottoms take their place visually; nothing reproduces the gelatinous texture.
- QuenellesForcemeat dumplings: raw veal or chicken pounded with panada and egg, sieved, enriched with cream, then shaped in two spoons and poached in barely trembling stock. A food processor does the pounding and sieving in one step. They should be poached separately and added to the hot sauce, not cooked in it.
- Vol-au-vent and its lidA tall round puff-pastry case with a cut-out cap. Bake it blind at 400-425F until well risen and dry through, lift out the lid and scrape away any soft pastry inside; a damp interior collapses under the sauce.
- YieldThe book gives none. A single vol-au-vent of about 8 inches serves four to six as an entrée; the same filling divides neatly among six individual cases.
- Reading the fragmentTo cook from this you need the earlier part of the recipe, which is not on this page. Treat it as instructions for finishing any white ragout in pastry: sauce, poached garnish, gentle heat, late filling.
Cockscombs belong to the vocabulary of nineteenth-century classical garnishing, where a named garnish signalled the whole composition of a dish — combs and kidneys with quenelles, mushrooms and truffle make up the garniture generally associated with à la financière, served in a pastry case or around a poached fowl. The point of such things was less flavour than legibility: a cook who could turn out four properly blanched combs, evenly matched quenelles and a vol-au-vent that stood up straight was demonstrating a French professional training to an employer paying for it. The vol-au-vent itself, whose name means something like "flying in the wind", is usually credited by tradition to the Parisian pastry trade of the early 1800s and to Carême's circle, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. Offal and trimmings of this kind were once ordinary market goods; their disappearance from butchers' counters, rather than any change in taste for pastry, is what makes the dish unrepeatable now.