No. 2397

Vol-au-Vent a la Nesle

Vol-au-vent a la Nesle

Take some well-buttered allemande sauce (No. 407) reduced with mushroom essence (No. 392); add to it some chicken quenelles made of chicken quenelle forcemeat (No. 89) molded with a coffeespoon (No. 155), small turned and cooked mushrooms and cooked lean ham cut in three-eighth inch squares. When both the garnishing and crust are very hot fill up in layers alternated with slices of calf's brains cooked when ready to use and then well drained. Decorate the top with fine trussed crawfish, and serve.

← No. 2396 Vol-au-Vent a la Financiere Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2398 Vol-au-Vent, Ancient Style—Large →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is an assembly, not a from-scratch recipe: Ranhofer assumes you already have the sauce, forcemeat and pastry case standing ready, and the numbers in parentheses point to those recipes elsewhere in The Epicurean. Everything hinges on temperature and timing at the moment of filling.

The hinge: everything must be hot and dryA vol-au-vent case softens the instant wet filling sits in it, so the crust goes into a warm oven while the garnish finishes and the two meet at the last second. Drain the brains thoroughly, as instructed, or the sauce will thin and the bottom of the case will collapse.
Allemande sauceA velouté (veal or chicken stock thickened with white roux) finished with an egg-yolk and cream liaison, then whisked with butter off the heat. Once the yolks are in it must not boil or it will curdle; hold it below about 180F. Reducing it with mushroom essence before adding the garnish keeps it thick enough to bind.
Mushroom essenceThe strained, reduced cooking liquor from mushrooms. Simmer trimmings and stems in a little water or light stock and reduce hard; a tablespoon or two of concentrated liquor does the work of a much larger volume of mushroom water.
Chicken quenellesPounded raw chicken with panada and cream, here molded with a coffeespoon, meaning small dumplings about the size of an olive. Poach them in barely trembling salted stock or water until they float and are firm, roughly 5 to 6 minutes; a rolling boil breaks them up.
"Turned" mushroomsSmall button caps carved with a paring knife into fluted domes, then cooked in water with lemon and butter to keep them white. The turning is purely decorative and can be skipped without harm to the dish.
Calf's brainsSold at some butchers but not at most supermarkets, and subject to restriction in some countries, since bovine central nervous tissue above certain age thresholds is treated as specified risk material under BSE rules. Check what is legal and available where you are; sweetbreads, poached and sliced, are the usual stand-in. Brains want soaking in cold acidulated water, peeling of the membrane, then a gentle poach in court-bouillon, and they must be cooked through, not merely warmed.
"Fine trussed crawfish"Whole cooked crawfish with the tail bent under and the claws hooked over it so they stand upright around the rim, a standard nineteenth-century garnish. Any small cooked crayfish or shell-on shrimp will do the same job.
YieldThe recipe specifies neither the size of the case nor the quantity of garnish; scale the filling to whatever vol-au-vent case you are using.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of what he cooked over three decades at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows the house method plainly: a bank of numbered mother preparations from which a hundred named dishes are combined. Vol-au-vent, literally "flight in the wind," describes the lightness of the puff-pastry case, and the form is generally traced to the early nineteenth-century Paris kitchen and often credited to Carême, who popularized if not invented it. The suffix à la Nesle belongs to a family of French garnish names whose origin is not established; like à la financière in the neighboring entry, it signals a particular fixed set of garnishes rather than a place of origin. Brains, quenelles, mushrooms and crawfish all belong to the same vanished taste for rich white ragouts of delicate, pale ingredients, a category of luxury that American diners largely abandoned within two generations of this book's publication.