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Apples, or any other Fresh Fruit
INGREDIENTS for good-sized dish. lb. of puff-paste, about 1 pint of fruit compote.
AVERAGE COST, 1s. 9d.
Make 3/4 lb. of puff-paste, taking care to bake it in a good brisk oven, to draw it up nicely and make it look light. Have ready sufficient stewed fruit, the syrup of which must be boiled down until very thick; fill the vol-au-vent with this, and pile it high in the centre; powder a little sugar over it, and put it back in the oven to glaze, or use a salamander for the purpose; the vol-au-vent is then ready to serve. It may be made with any fruit that is in season, such as rhubarb, oranges, gooseberries, currants, cherries, apples, &c.; but care must be taken not to have the syrup too thin, for fear of its breaking through the crust.
TIME. hour to 40 minutes to bake the vol-au-vent. 3 "We may live without poetry, music and art, We may live without conscience and live without heart; We may live without friends; we may live without books, But civilized man cannot live without cooks."
WAFERS, GENEVA.
AFERS, Geneva. INGREDIENTS for goodsized dish. 2 eggs, 3 oz. of butter, 3 oz. of flour, 3 oz. of pounded sugar. AVERAGE COST, exclusive of the preserve and cream, 6d.
Well whisk the eggs; put them into a basin, and stir to them the butter, which should be beaten to a cream; add the flour and sifted sugar gradually, and then mix all well together. Butter a baking-sheet, and drop on it a teaspoonful of the mixture at a time, leaving a space between each. Bake in a cool oven; watch the pieces of paste, and, when half done, roll them up like wafers, and put in a small wedge of bread or piece of wood, to keep them in shape.
Return them to the oven until crisp. Before serving, remove the bread, put a spoonful of preserve in the widest end, and fill up with whipped cream. This is a very pretty and ornamental dish for the suppertable, and is very nice and easily made. TIME.-Altogether from 20 to 25 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
OWEN MEREDITH ("Lucile").
WALNUT KETCHUP.
This is a fruit vol-au-vent: a baked puff-paste case filled at the last moment with thick compote and glazed. Almost everything depends on the syrup being reduced far enough.
- The hinge: reduce the syrupStewed fruit straight from the pan will soak the pastry and run out of the base within minutes. Strain the fruit, boil the syrup down until it is thick and sticky, then recombine — it should mound on a spoon rather than pool.
- "A good brisk oven"The book gives no temperature. For puff paste this is usually read as a hot oven, somewhere around 425-450F: hot at the start to force the layers up, easing back if the case colours faster than it dries out.
- Baking timeThe original TIME line is damaged ('hour to 40 minutes'), most likely half an hour to 40 minutes. A case of this size needs long enough to rise and then to set the interior, so the walls do not collapse when filled.
- Building the caseThe recipe assumes the case is already known: it says only to make the puff-paste and bake it. The usual method is to cut two rounds of paste, mark an inner circle on the top one and cut most of the way through to form a lid, then lift out the lid after baking and scrape away any soft dough inside before filling.
- Puff-paste quantityThe working figure is 3/4 lb (about 340 g); the ingredient line has lost its fraction in the printing, but the method states it plainly. The recipe describes the result only as a "good-sized dish".
- About a pint of compoteAn Imperial pint is 20 fl oz, roughly 2 1/2 US cups. Since the syrup has to be boiled down hard, stew rather more fruit than the finished pint suggests.
- SalamanderA salamander was an iron plate heated red and held over the dish to brown the sugar. A broiler set high, or a blowtorch, does the same work; watch it, as puff pastry scorches quickly.
- Choice of fruitApples, gooseberries and rhubarb all hold their shape well; use rhubarb stalks only, never the leaves. Very juicy fruit such as cherries or currants needs the longest reduction.
Vol-au-vent means "flight in the wind" — a name generally traced to the lightness of the risen paste, and the form itself is usually credited to the great French pastry cooks of the early nineteenth century, Carême among them. By Mrs Beeton's day the case had been thoroughly domesticated in English kitchens, appearing in savoury form with oyster, chicken or sweetbread fillings and, as here, as a sweet supper dish. The instruction to use "any fruit that is in season" is characteristic of Victorian household writing: the recipe is really a method for a shell and a thickened compote, with the fruit left to the calendar and the kitchen garden.