No. 11

To Prepare Bouchees

Pour Preparer les Bouchees

Roll out on a floured table some six turned puff paste (No. 146), keeping it one quarter of an inch in thickness; let this paste rest, and then cut from it a dozen round pieces, using a channeled pastry cutter, from two, to two and a quarter inches in diameter (Fig. 16). Turn these over on to a wet baking sheet, leaving them a short distance apart, and egg over the surfaces with a brush. Trace on them quickly a ring using a smooth, well heated pastry cutter (Fig. 17), so that the incision is clear, and with a small knife trace three lines in the inside of this ring (Fig. 18); put the baking sheet into an oven, not excessively hot, and cook the bounchees for eighteen to twenty minutes; detach them from the baking-sheet, slipping a knife underneath each one, open at once to empty them, save the covers, and keep warm until needed.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's bouchée is a small vol-au-vent: a fluted disc of puff paste scored so the centre rises as a lid and can be lifted out to make a case. Most of what needs translating here is vocabulary and oven heat.

"Six turned puff paste"This means puff pastry that has been given six turns (folds), the standard for classic feuilletage. All-butter frozen puff pastry, thawed in the refrigerator, stands in reasonably well; supermarket sheets rolled to 1/4 inch will give a shorter rise but the method is unchanged.
"Channeled" pastry cutterA fluted or crinkle-edged round cutter, 2 to 2 1/4 inches, as the recipe specifies. The fluting is generally taken as decorative; Ranhofer gives no reason for it.
Oven "not excessively hot"Ranhofer gives no figure; a moderately hot oven, somewhere in the region of 400-425F, is a reasonable modern reading. Puff paste needs enough heat to turn the water in the butter layers to steam, but small bouchees can colour before the centre sets if the oven is very hot.
The wet baking sheetWetting the sheet rather than greasing it is deliberate; the steam it gives off is usually credited with helping the pastry rise. A parchment-lined sheet is the usual modern substitute.
Egg wash the top onlyKeep the brush off the cut sides. Egg running down the edge glues the laminated layers together and the bouchée rises lopsided or not at all.
The heated cutterWarming the smooth cutter before pressing the inner ring gives the clear incision the recipe asks for, without dragging or sealing the layers. The cut should go only partway through, so that the centre lifts out as a lid after baking.
Let the paste restThe recipe rests the rolled sheet before cutting. Relaxed gluten means the discs bake round rather than shrinking; a spell in the refrigerator does no harm.
Open them at onceThe recipe has you empty the shells while hot and save the covers, which lets the steam escape; sealed and left to cool, the interior stays damp. Hold the empty cases somewhere just warm.
YieldA dozen shells, as the recipe states.

A Little History

Bouchée is simply French for "mouthful," and the pastry is the miniature of the vol-au-vent, the tall puff-paste case that Carême's generation made a centrepiece of the service. Ranhofer, who came to Delmonico's in New York in 1862 and was associated with the house, with interruptions, for much of the rest of the century, put this in The Epicurean (1894) among the Elementary Methods rather than the recipes proper: it is not a dish but a vessel, one of the standard components a kitchen brigade was expected to produce by the tray and fill later with a salpicon of chicken, sweetbreads, oysters or lobster. The cross-references to numbered paste recipes and to the figures showing the cutters are typical of the book's structure, which was written less as a home cookbook than as a working manual for a professional kitchen of the period.