No. 2399

Chicken Vol-au-Vent with Mushrooms-Large

Gros Vol-au-vent de Volaille aux Champignons

Prepare the crust as for the financiere (No. 2396), reduce some veloute sauce (No. 415) with mushroom stock, and when done thicken with raw egg-yolks diluted with a little cream, then incorporate a piece of fresh butter, pass it through a tammy, and add to this sauce some braised white of chicken free of skin, sinews, or fat, and half the same quantity of mushroom heads or cut-up mushrooms. When the crust is very hot, also the garnishing, fill and lay the cover over, then serve. The chicken may be replaced by braised sweetbreads or spring lamb, either of which should be well pared and cut in slices.

← No. 2398 Vol-au-Vent, Ancient Style—Large Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2400 Salt Codfish Vol-au-Vent-Large →

For the Modern Kitchen

Escoffier's contemporary Charles Ranhofer wrote for cooks who had a stocked garde-manger and a numbered index at their elbow; the recipe assumes you already have a baked puff pastry case, a pot of velouté and cooked chicken. Everything here is assembly.

Do not boil the liaisonOnce the raw yolks and cream go into the reduced velouté, the sauce must be held below a simmer — around 180°F — or the yolks curdle and the sauce breaks into threads. Stir over gentle heat only until it coats the spoon, then take it off.
The crustA gros vol-au-vent is a single large puff pastry case, baked with a lid cut from the same round. Modern all-butter frozen puff pastry works; bake it fully and hold it warm so it does not soften while the filling finishes.
"Pass it through a tammy"A tammy was a worsted straining cloth wrung between two people to force sauce through. A fine chinois pressed with a small ladle, or a double layer of rinsed cheesecloth, does the same job.
Velouté and mushroom stockVelouté No. 415 is Ranhofer's velouté — light roux slackened with white stock. The mushroom stock is the strained liquor from cooking the mushrooms; reducing the two together is what carries the flavour, so do not skip it in favour of plain cream.
ProportionsRanhofer specifies mushrooms at half the quantity of the chicken. For a large case, that works out at roughly 3 cups diced braised chicken breast to 1½ cups mushrooms, bound with enough finished sauce to coat, not to flood.
Braised white of chickenPoached or braised breast, cooled and cut in neat dice or thin slices. Roast chicken is drier and will not absorb the sauce the same way. Trim skin, sinew and fat as directed; the dish depends on uniform white pieces.
Heat everything before it meetsThe instruction that the crust be very hot "also the garnishing" is the whole trick. A warm filling in a cool case steams the pastry limp within a minute. Fill at the pass and send it immediately.
YieldA case this size serves a table as a single course, and does not reheat — the pastry is finished once it has taken up sauce.

A Little History

The vol-au-vent — literally "flight in the wind", traditionally explained as pastry so light it might blow away — is generally traced to early nineteenth-century Paris and to Carême's circle, and it became a fixture of the grand nineteenth-century menu in America. Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for some three decades, gives it in The Epicurean (1894) in a whole run of variations: financière, ancient style, chicken with mushrooms, salt codfish. That range is the point. The case was a neutral vessel, and the kitchen judged a menu's balance by what went inside it, from truffled sweetbreads for a banquet to salt cod for a Friday. The cross-references to other numbered recipes reflect how such a kitchen actually worked — velouté and braised poultry stood ready as components, and an entrée like this was built in minutes from stock parts rather than cooked from scratch to order.