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Lobster Vol-au-Vent
Rub together four tablespoonfuls of butter and one and one-half tablespoonfuls of flour. Pour on this by degrees one pint of boiling white stock, boil up, and add the juice of half a lemon, a little salt, a few grains of cayenne, the yolks of two eggs beaten in a little cold water, and the meat of two small lobsters cut into dice. Stir over the fire for one minute, fill a vol-au-vent case, place the cover on and serve.
A classic butter-flour-stock velouté enriched with egg yolks, spooned into puff pastry. The whole thing hangs on the yolks: once they go in, the sauce must never boil again.
- The hinge: the yolk liaisonAfter the beaten yolks go in, keep the pan below a simmer — 180F at most. The one minute of stirring the recipe allows is enough to thicken; a boil will curdle the sauce into grains.
- White stockAn unroasted veal or chicken stock, pale and lightly gelatinous. Unsalted chicken stock works; a shellfish stock made from the lobster shells is arguably better still.
- Butter and flour proportionsFour tablespoons butter to one and a half of flour is deliberately fat-heavy — this is a loose, sauce-like filling, not a stiff paste. If you want it to hold in the case, take the flour up to three tablespoons.
- Vol-au-vent caseA tall puff pastry shell with a lid cut from the top. Frozen all-butter puff pastry, cut in rounds with a smaller round scored two-thirds through the top, bakes at 400F until risen and dry inside; scoop out the soft center before filling.
- The lobsters"Two small lobsters" means two whole ones of about a pound each, boiled and picked — roughly 6 to 8 oz of picked meat. Buy that weight of cooked lobster meat if you would rather not do the picking.
- Add the lobster last and warm onlyThe meat is already cooked. It goes in to heat through, not to cook; more than a minute or two in hot sauce and it turns cottony.
- Seasoning"A few grains of cayenne" is a pinch, no more — it should sharpen the lobster, not announce itself. Note that the recipe adds the lemon juice before the yolks.
- YieldEnough for one large vol-au-vent serving four to six as a first course, or six to eight individual cases.
Vol-au-vent — "flight in the wind," for pastry so light it might blow away — is a French construction generally credited in cooking lore to the early nineteenth-century pâtissier Antonin Carême's circle, and by the 1890s it had become a fixture of American hotel and banquet menus, filled with sweetbreads, chicken, oysters or lobster. Its appeal to a large hotel kitchen was practical: the cases could be baked in quantity in advance and filled at service. Lobster was a luxury filling in that period, the animal having shed its earlier reputation as cheap coastal food to become a marker of hotel dining; an egg-yolk liaison, rather than more roux, is a traditional French way of finishing such a sauce and gives it a pale gloss.