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Vol-au-Vent of Eggs
Make a vol-au-vent case, and fill it with alternate layers of puree of mushrooms and scrambled eggs, adding a little tomato sauce onto each layer, and between these strew some grated cheese.
Oscar assumes a professional pastry section and a cook who already knows the mother sauces, so the whole assembly is compressed into one sentence. The points below fill in what the Waldorf brigade would have taken for granted.
- What a vol-au-vent case isA tall round case of puff paste, baked hollow with a lid: cut two discs, cut a ring from one, egg-wash and stack, then bake in a hot oven until risen and dry through. The book gives no temperature or timing. All-butter frozen puff pastry gives an honest result; a large case will serve several as a first course, small individual cases one each.
- The case must be dry before it is filledThis is the hinge. A vol-au-vent collapses into paste the moment wet filling sits in an under-baked case. Scoop out any soft dough from the interior and return the shell to the oven for a few minutes to dry, and fill it only at the moment of service.
- Puree of mushroomsRead as mushrooms cooked down in butter with shallot until the moisture is gone and reduced to a thick puree, bound with a spoonful of thick bechamel or reduced cream; a dry duxelles bound the same way answers the purpose. It should hold its shape on a spoon, not run.
- Scrambled eggs, French stylePeriod hotel scrambled eggs were cooked slowly over low heat or in a bain-marie with butter, to a soft custard rather than dry curds. Stop while they still look slightly underdone; they carry on setting in the hot case. Figure two eggs per person.
- Tomato sauceA little, and best thick: the recipe specifies only 'a little tomato sauce', and a reduced sauce tomate rather than a thin puree will keep from soaking the pastry from the inside.
- The cheeseThe recipe says only 'grated cheese'; Parmesan or a dry Gruyere suit the purpose. It works as a seasoning here rather than a blanket -- a spoonful or so per layer.
- Assembly and orderBuild hot into hot, following the recipe's order: mushroom puree, a spoon of tomato sauce, cheese, eggs, and repeat, finishing with the pastry lid. The recipe says only 'alternate layers' and fixes no number.
Vol-au-vent - "flight in the wind", a gloss often repeated for the way the puff paste rises to almost nothing, though it is folk explanation rather than established etymology - is a French pastry case that nineteenth-century restaurant cooking filled with anything from sweetbreads to lobster; its invention is traditionally credited to Careme, though the attribution is more repeated than documented. By the time Oscar Tschirky was overseeing the Waldorf's dining rooms at the turn of the twentieth century, the case had become a standard unit of the hotel repertoire, a way of turning inexpensive materials such as eggs and mushrooms into something with the height and ceremony that a la carte service demanded. The terseness of the entry is telling: Oscar's book was compiled from a working establishment, and one may infer from the brevity that the recipe records only the combination, not the craft.