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Vol-au-Vent à la Toulouse
Ingredients.
Half a pound of Puff Paste, which must have had seven turns, from which cut either small cases, or one ordinary-sized vol-auvent case, brush with egg and bake till a nice brown in an oven not too hot; when baked. remove the centre. Put in a stewpan- Half a pint of Suprême Sauce.
Half a cold Chicken or Sweetbreads, cut in neat pieces.
Two ounces of Tongue.
Three Truffles, sliced.
The instructions here are compressed to the point of shorthand: the ingredient list is the method. Warm the garnish through in the sauce, fill the baked case at the moment of serving, and replace the pastry lid.
- "Seven turns"A specification for full classic puff pastry. A turn is a roll-out and fold of the dough with the butter already enclosed, not a fresh addition of butter each time; six is the usual classic number, so this recipe asks for one more than standard. Ready-made all-butter puff can stand in.
- Oven "not too hot"The book gives no figure. Puff needs enough heat to burst the layers into steam but not so much that a tall vol-au-vent colours before its centre sets. As a modern guide only, something in the region of 400F, dropped once it has risen, and the case watched rather than timed.
- Half a pintIn a British book of this date that is an Imperial half pint, 10 fl oz, or about 1¼ US cups. It is barely enough to bind the garnish, which is correct — this filling should be coated, not soupy.
- Suprême sauceA chicken velouté finished with cream and a little lemon, not a béchamel. Once the cream is in, keep it below a simmer; boiling breaks it and the sauce turns grainy and dull.
- SweetbreadsVeal sweetbreads must be soaked in several changes of cold water, blanched, trimmed of membrane and pressed under a weight before they are cut up. The recipe assumes you have already done this and that they are cold.
- TongueTwo ounces of cooked tongue, in a dish of this kind most likely pickled or salted ox tongue, cut in small dice or lozenges; its job is colour and salt against the pale sauce. Cooked ham can stand in.
- TrufflesThree fresh black truffles is an extravagance no one will repeat; a small jar of preserved truffle, or a spoonful of truffle peelings with their juice, gives the same register. Sautéed brown mushrooms are an honest substitute that does not pretend otherwise.
- Assembly and yieldFill only when the case is out of the oven and the sauce is hot, or the pastry base goes to paste. One ordinary vol-au-vent serves four as an entrée; the small cases run about eight.
À la Toulouse is one of the fixed garnishes of nineteenth-century French service: white meat — chicken, sweetbreads, sometimes cockscombs and kidneys — with tongue, mushrooms or truffles, bound in a suprême or allemande sauce, and it turns up as a filling for vol-au-vent, bouchées and timbales alike. The name is generally traced to the south-west and its poultry, though by the time it reached books like this one it functioned as a code word: a cook reading "Toulouse" on a menu knew exactly which pale, creamy, truffle-flecked garnish was meant. The vol-au-vent itself — "flight in the wind", for how little the baked case weighs — is credited by tradition to Carême, and its appeal to a late-Victorian kitchen was practical as much as ornamental: it turned the cold remains of a roast chicken into a dish fit for the entrée course.