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Bouchees a la Reine
Get some little cases from the pastry-cook of puff paste, which are to be filled with sweetbread cut in dice. It is a good plan to heat the cases before filling them. The filling mixture. Cook the sweetbreads in water with pepper and salt, till done, skin them and cut in dice. Prepare a good bechamel sauce, seasoned with the juice of a lemon, and add to it a few mushrooms that have been fried in butter. Heat the dice of sweetbread in this sauce and fill the cases with it. Put them back in the oven to get quite hot.
A filled puff-pastry case, entirely dependent on the quality of the sweetbreads and the béchamel. The original assumes you can buy the shells and that you know how to handle offal; both need a little filling in.
- Sweetbreads: soak and press firstVeal sweetbreads should be soaked in several changes of cold water for 2-3 hours to draw out blood, then blanched 3-5 minutes, cooled in ice water, and the outer membrane peeled away. Pressing them flat between two plates with a weight for an hour firms the texture so they dice cleanly rather than crumbling.
- Poaching timeAfter blanching, 15-20 minutes at a bare simmer in salted, peppered water is enough for veal sweetbreads. Longer and they turn grainy. The elongated throat sweetbread cooks a little faster than the rounder "heart" sweetbread.
- Buying themSweetbreads are the thymus (and, in some usage, the pancreas) of a calf or lamb. A butcher will usually order them in; they are rarely on supermarket shelves. Allow about 1 lb for six to eight cases.
- The cases"Little cases from the pastry-cook" means vol-au-vent or bouchée shells. Frozen puff pastry cut with two rounds, one with the centre stamped out, baked at 400F until risen and dry, does the same job. Bake them fully before filling or the base goes soggy.
- Béchamel proportionsThe recipe gives none: 2 tbsp butter, 2 tbsp flour and 1 cup milk makes a sauce thick enough to coat the diced sweetbread without running out of the pastry. Add the lemon juice off the heat and stir it in quickly, since acid can make a milk sauce grainy.
- MushroomsFry them in butter until the water has cooked off and the edges brown; adding them wet thins the sauce. Quarter or slice them so they match the dice of sweetbread in size.
- Filling and reheatingWarm the shells, fill them hot, and return them to a hot oven only for 3-5 minutes. This is a reheat, not a bake, and the sauce will split if it is held long in the oven.
- ServingOne or two per person as a first course; a single large vol-au-vent filled the same way serves four as a light main dish. Assemble at the last moment.
Bouchée à la reine — "a queen's mouthful" — is the small sister of vol-au-vent à la financière, and the name is traditionally attached to Marie Leszczyńska, queen to Louis XV, though the connection is culinary legend rather than documented fact. What is certain is that a rich white filling of sweetbread, mushroom and béchamel in puff pastry was standard high-bourgeois party food across France and Belgium by the nineteenth century, and that it survives today as a Belgian classic in the form of vol-au-vent with chicken and meatballs. The instruction to buy the shells from the pastry-cook tells its own story: puff paste was a specialist's job, and a household cook was expected to make the filling and leave the lamination to the professional round the corner. The Belgian Cook Book was compiled during the First World War by Mrs. Brian Luck from recipes gathered from Belgian refugees in Britain, and dishes like this one are a reminder that what was being recorded was not wartime privation but the ordinary domestic cooking of a country under occupation.