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Vol-au-Vent de Pommes
à la Reine.
Ingredients.
Two pounds of Apples.
Four ounces of Castor Sugar.
One gill of Water.
One tablespoonful of Lemon-juice.
The Rind of a Lemon (grated).
Put the apples peeled and cored into a stewpan with the sugar, lemon-juice and rind, and the water, and cook all well together, then rub through a hair-sieve. Butter the bottom of a stewpan, grate a little nutmeg in the butter, pour in the apple, and let it cook till it is like marmalade. Pour this mixture into a vol-au-vent case already cooked, and cover over with meringue top made of the whites of two eggs well whipped, and four ounces of castor sugar stirred in; put this in the oven till the meringue top is a nice light brown. If liked, whipped cream can be used for the top instead of the meringue. a Jalamo yaobi
A cooked apple marmalade in a pre-baked puff pastry case, finished with meringue. The success of the dish rests on driving enough water out of the apple that the purée holds its shape and does not soak the pastry.
- The hinge: cook the purée down hardAfter sieving, the apple goes back into the buttered pan and must reduce until it is genuinely like marmalade — thick enough that a spoon drawn through leaves a clear track. A loose purée will collapse the vol-au-vent base within minutes.
- A gillIn a British book of this period, a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, about 5 fl oz or 150 ml. A US gill is 4 fl oz. Either way it is only there to stop the apples catching at the start; use less if the fruit is very juicy.
- Castor sugarSuperfine sugar. Ordinary granulated will work in the stewed apple, but for the meringue use superfine so it dissolves in the whites rather than weeping out later.
- ApplesTwo pounds of a cooking apple that breaks down — Bramley, or any tart apple that goes to a fluff. Dessert apples hold their shape and will not sieve cleanly. Note that the recipe does not say whether the two pounds is weighed before or after peeling and coring, and the purée reduces further in the second cooking.
- Rub through a hair-sieveA nylon or stainless drum sieve does the same job; a food mill on its fine plate is faster. A blender is not the same thing, since it aerates the purée and gives a paler, slacker result.
- Oven for the meringueFour ounces of sugar to two whites is a firm meringue. To brown it lightly without slumping, 350F for 8-10 minutes, or 400F for 4-5 if you want colour fast on a filling that is already warm. A grill or blowtorch also serves.
- The pastry caseA pre-baked puff pastry vol-au-vent large enough to hold the reduced purée, bought or made. Fill it as close to serving as you can manage — the assembled dish does not keep past a couple of hours.
- YieldServes six to eight as a dessert.
Vol-au-vent — "flight in the wind" — is a case of puff pastry baked hollow, the name generally credited in French kitchen lore to Carême, whose pastry work fixed the form in the early nineteenth century. Savoury fillings dominate, but sweet versions like this one, with fruit and a meringue lid, belonged to the dessert course of the late-Victorian and Edwardian dinner. The suffix à la Reine conventionally denotes a poultry preparation in classical French usage — potage à la reine, vol-au-vent à la reine — and its use here for an apple filling is an exception. The apple base here is simply a well-reduced marmalade of the kind any household kitchen produced, dressed up by the pastry case and the meringue into something fit for company.