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Vol-au-Vent of Chicken
Cut a pint and a half of cooked chicken meat into dice and season with salt and pepper. Make a cream sauce and season also with salt and pepper, adding half a teaspoonful each of onion juice and made mustard. Heat the chicken in this, and with it fill some vol-au-vent cases.
Vol-au-Vent, Toulouse Prepare one-half pound of puff paste, giving it six turns. Roll the paste out to about two inches in thickness, and with a small round tin cutter divide the paste into rounds; with another tin cutter, one inch smaller in diameter than the one just used, cut three parts through the center of each round of paste, thus forming the lids. Place the cases on a baking-sheet in a moderate oven, and bake until done, and nicely browned. Then lift up the middle pieces carefully and scoop out the underdone paste. Prepare a few quenelles of chicken forcemeat, place them in a saucepan with the flesh of half of a cooked cold chicken cut into small pieces, two ounces of chopped cooked tongue, three or four sliced truffles, five or six mushrooms, three cockscombs and one-half pint of supreme sauce. Stir the above mixture over the fire until hot, though not boiling, fill the vol-au-vents with it, arrange them on a folded napkin or an ornamental dish-paper laid on a hot dish, and serve without delay. The cases should only be filled when ready to serve, as if left standing long the mixture in them is likely to make them heavy.
Chicken, Waldorf Style Boil a chicken till it is tender, take it from the fire, and remove all the white meat, cutting it into dice-shaped pieces, and adding two large truffles, cut the same. Put these all into a saucepan with a pint of fresh thick cream, season with salt and pepper, and allow it to boil for twelve minutes, then thicken with two raw egg-yolks diluted in two large spoonfuls of Madeira wine. Stir this thoroughly in with the chicken, also two ounces of fresh batter added in small bits, and mingle without letting it boil again, then serve.
Three related preparations run together here: a plain creamed-chicken filling, the elaborate Toulouse garnish, and a cream-and-Madeira version. All of them depend on hot pastry, hot filling, and no boiling once the enrichment goes in.
- The hinge: no boiling after the liaisonBoth the Toulouse mixture and the Waldorf Style version are held below a simmer once the supreme sauce or the egg yolks are in. Yolks diluted in Madeira will curdle into threads the moment the cream returns to a boil; keep the pan at about 180F and stir until it coats the spoon.
- Oven heat for the casesThe book says only "a moderate oven" and gives no temperature. Puff paste needs the initial blast of steam that 400-425F provides: start the cases at 425F for the first 15 minutes to get the lift, then drop to about 350F to dry them through.
- "Two inches in thickness"This may be a printing error, or a reference to the stacked block rather than the rolled sheet. Puff paste for vol-au-vent cases is usually rolled a good deal thinner, around half an inch; the recipe directs the lid ring to be cut "three parts through" the round, that is most of the way down but not through.
- QuantitiesA pint and a half of diced cooked chicken is about 3 cups, or roughly a pound of picked meat. The recipe does not say how many cases the half-pound of puff paste yields.
- Made mustard and onion juice"Made mustard" is prepared mustard from the jar, not dry powder. Onion juice was got by halving an onion and pressing it on a reamer or scraping the cut face; grate an onion on a microplane and press the pulp through a sieve for the same half teaspoon.
- Supreme sauceA chicken velouté finished with cream and sometimes a little mushroom liquor. If you are not making it separately, a well-reduced velouté loosened with heavy cream is the same thing in practice.
- Cockscombs and trufflesCockscombs were a standard Toulouse garnish, blanched, peeled and simmered in white stock; they are effectively unobtainable now and the dish loses nothing important without them. Fresh truffles can be replaced by a small quantity of preserved black truffle, added at the end so the aroma survives.
- "Fresh batter"A typesetting slip for butter. Two ounces, cold and in small pieces, swirled in off the heat to finish the sauce.
- ServingThe warning about filling only at the last moment is real: sauce sitting in baked puff pastry turns the interior to paste within minutes. Warm the empty cases, fill, and carry them out immediately.
Vol-au-vent means "flight in the wind," a name for the tall, nearly weightless puff-paste case that is generally credited by tradition to Antonin Carême's kitchen in early nineteenth-century Paris. The Toulouse garnish—quenelles, tongue, truffle, mushroom, cockscombs bound in supreme sauce—was one of the fixed classical garnitures that any French-trained chef of Oscar Tschirky's generation could produce from memory. The third preparation, "Chicken, Waldorf Style," calls for white meat, truffle, cream, a yolk-and-Madeira liaison, and butter, with none of the offal garnishes. That contrast between the inherited classical dish and the smoother, richer variant is much of what the book records about American dining at the turn of the century.