No. 2395

Vol-au-Vent a la Dieppoise

Vol-au-vent a la Dieppoise

For this there must be prepared a vol-au-vent crust, as explained in No. 180; remove the cover to empty it out thoroughly, then keep it warm, or if it has been made some time beforehand just heat it in a slow oven for a few minutes. Reduce some lean veloute sauce (No. 416), then thicken it with egg-yolks, fresh butter and lemon juice, strain through a tammy and keep it in a bain-marie; add to it some cooked mussels, some fish (sole) quenelles, mushrooms and shrimps. When all is very hot, fill the crust, cover with the lid and serve.

← No. 2394 Turban of Lobsters Garnished with Shells Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2396 Vol-au-Vent a la Financiere →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade that already has puff paste, velouté and quenelle forcemeat standing by, so the whole dish reads as an assembly note. The points below fill in what the original assumes.

The hinge: the sauce must not boilOnce the reduced velouté is finished with egg yolks, butter and lemon it will curdle if it returns to a simmer. Hold it in a bain-marie at around 160-170F and add the garnish there, hot but never bubbling.
"Lean" veloutéMaigre in this context means a velouté built on fish stock rather than veal or chicken — appropriate to a seafood filling and to fast days. Use a light fish fumet or the strained mussel liquor let down with stock.
TammyA tammy cloth was a fine worsted sieve; the sauce was pushed through it with two people twisting the ends. A chinois lined with muslin, or a fine conical strainer, does the same job.
The crustVol-au-vent here is a single large puff pastry case with a cut lid, not the cocktail-sized shells sold today. Bake blind, scoop out the soft interior, and refresh in a slow oven — Ranhofer gives no temperature, but a modern equivalent is somewhere around 300F — for five to ten minutes. Fill only at the moment of service or the base goes to paste.
MusselsSteam them open in white wine with shallot, discard any that stay shut, and pull off the beards. Save and strain the liquor for the sauce. They are already cooked when they open; anything further shrinks them to rubber.
ShrimpsRanhofer means small cooked shrimp, peeled. They go in at the last second, purely to heat through.
Sole quenellesSole fillet pounded with panada, egg white and cream, then poached in barely trembling salted water as small spoon-shaped dumplings. A food processor does the pounding; keep everything cold.
MushroomsProfessional French kitchens of the period commonly cooked small cultivated button mushrooms in water with lemon and butter to keep them pale. Quarter larger caps and cook them the same way rather than browning them, which would muddy the sauce.
YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough working guide, a crust of about 8 inches across with something like a quart of finished ragoût would serve six to eight as a first course.

A Little History

À la Dieppoise names the fishing port of Dieppe on the Normandy coast, long an important supplier of mussels, shrimp and sole to Paris, and at some point the label hardened in professional French cookery into a fixed garnish: mussels, shrimp tails and mushrooms bound in a white wine and fish velouté. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894, treats it as one entry in a long catalogue of vol-au-vent fillings, each named for its garnish rather than its method — financière, toulousaine, dieppoise — which is why the instructions are so brief. The reader is expected to turn back to the numbered cross-references for the pastry and the sauce and simply combine them. The vol-au-vent itself, a hollow puff case filled at the last moment, is generally traced to the pastry work of Antonin Carême in the early nineteenth century, though the term itself predates him, and by Ranhofer's day it was standard banquet equipment: showy, made in advance, and adaptable to whatever ragoût the menu required.