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Oyster Vol-au-Vent
Put the liquor and beards of three dozen oysters into a saucepan, add a little pepper (cayenne) and the finely chopped rind and strained juice of half a lemon. Put the pan on the fire, boil up the liquor and thicken with three ounces of butter rubbed into two tablespoonfuls of flour. Continue to boil till the liquor is reduced to one teacupful, strain it into another saucepan, add the oysters, place the pan at the side of the fire and simmer gently for five or six minutes, then stir in one teacupful of cream and keep the mixture warm. Prepare a paste as follows: Rub twelve ounces of butter into an equal quantity of flour and mix in the juice of a lemon added to one egg beaten up in one teacupful of cold water. Make this into a paste, handling it as little as possible, turn it out on a well-floured board and roll it out to one and one-fourth inches in thickness. Cut it with a vol-au-vent tin cutter to take off the rough edges, make it the required shape, cut round the top one-half inch from the edge and one-fourth inch deep and bake the vol-au-vent in a hot oven for forty-five minutes. When done carefully take out the center, remove the soft underdone paste and fill it up with the oyster mixture. Arrange the vol-au-vent on a napkin spread over a dish and serve with a garnish of fried parsley.
A Waldorf-era puff-paste case filled with creamed oysters. Two things need attention: the paste is a true equal-weight rough puff, and the oysters are cooked far longer than they should be.
- The oystersFive or six minutes of simmering, on top of whatever the liquor reduction gave them, will make them tough and shrunken. Shucked oysters need roughly a minute in hot liquid, just until the edges ruffle; add them off the heat with the cream and let the residual warmth finish them.
- "Beards"The dark frill of gills and mantle around the oyster. Modern shucked oysters are sold whole in their liquor, so simply simmer a few whole oysters in the liquor to build the base, then strain them out and discard, reserving the rest for the filling.
- TeacupfulNot a modern teacup. The measure was never standardised, but for this period it is usually reckoned at around 6 fl oz, three-quarters of a cup. Reduce the liquor to roughly that much, and use the same measure of cream.
- A hot ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; "hot oven" in this period is usually read as somewhere around 425-450F. Forty-five minutes at that heat will scorch a case in most modern ovens; start at 425F for 15-20 minutes to get the lift, then drop to 350F to dry the interior out, checking from 30 minutes.
- The pasteTwelve ounces of butter to twelve ounces of flour is a full puff ratio, but the method given is rubbing-in, and no turns or folds are specified at all, so it reads closest to a rough puff: rub the butter in coarsely, leaving visible lumps, and bring it together with the egg, lemon juice and water. Handle it as little as possible and keep it cold, or the butter smears and the case will not rise.
- Rolling and cuttingOne and a quarter inches is correct and deliberate for a vol-au-vent; the height is what gives you a case deep enough to hollow. The inner cut, half an inch in and a quarter inch deep, becomes the lid, so score it cleanly with a sharp knife and do not cut through.
- Fried parsleyDry sprigs dropped into hot fat for a few seconds until they stop hissing, then drained. They spit; use a spatter guard.
- YieldThree dozen oysters and a large case will serve six to eight as a first course, or four as a lunch dish. The same filling divides well among individual cases.
Vol-au-vent — literally "flight in the wind," a name for the case's lightness — belongs to the French pâtisserie tradition and is generally traced to the early nineteenth-century Paris kitchens associated with Carême, from which it passed into the repertoire of every grand hotel that cooked in the French manner. Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and then the Waldorf-Astoria from the 1890s, and his book is a record of what an American luxury hotel served when its menus were written in French and its cooks trained in it. Oysters belong to the same picture from the other direction: they were still cheap and enormously abundant in New York waters, the everyday shellfish of the city, and the pairing of a common local ingredient with an elaborate imported case is very much how this kind of kitchen worked.