No. 2404

Vol-au-Vent a la Lucini—Small

Petits Vol-au-vent a la Lucini

Prepare the small vol-au-vent (No. 180): when cooked take off the covers, empty out the insides and replace these covers by a game quenelle (No. 91) one inch and a half in diameter by an eighth of an inch thick; poach and bread-crumb them by dipping them in Villeroi sauce (No. 560), then rolling them in bread-crumbs, then fry to a good color. Put into a saucepan some brown sauce (No. 414) and Madeira wine; add to this some game fumet (No. 397) mixed with a garnishing composed of two-thirds of small young rabbit quenelles (No. 91) molded in a small coffeespoon (No. 155) and one-third of small turned mushroom heads (No. 118), or in case there be no small ones then cut-up others in two or four pieces. With this garnishing fill the small crusts, lay the Villeroi quenelle on top and in the center of it a round slice of truffle one inch in diameter and glaze over.

← No. 2403 Vol-au-Vent a la Delmontes—Small Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2405 Vol-au-Vent of Oysters a la Maintenon—Small →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes in cross-references, so this reads as a shopping list of other recipes rather than a method. Stripped down, it is a puff-paste case filled with a Madeira-and-game ragout, lidded with a breaded, fried game forcemeat disc and finished with truffle and glaze.

The hinge: chill the Villeroi coatingSauce Villeroi is a thick allemande- or veloute-type sauce used purely as a coating. The poached quenelle discs are best dipped, then spread on a tray and chilled until the sauce is firm and matte before crumbing, or the breading can slide off in the fat. Ranhofer gives no frying temperature; fry briefly in fairly hot fat, only to colour.
Quenelles, in plain termsA game quenelle here is raw game flesh (the recipe assumes rabbit, hare or feathered game) pounded with a panade and cream or butter, seasoned and sieved. Modern equivalent: food-processor mousseline, about 1 part cream to 3 parts lean meat by weight, tested by poaching a small piece before you commit.
Poaching temperaturePoach quenelles in barely trembling stock or salted water at roughly 170-180F. A real simmer breaks the emulsion and they turn spongy and weep fat.
The coffeespoon mouldThe small quenelles for the garnish are moulded with a spoon; the recipe specifies a small coffeespoon (No. 155). A coffeespoon holds rather less than a teaspoon, so expect dumplings roughly the size of an olive.
Game fumetNot a court-bouillon. In Ranhofer's usage a fumet is a strongly reduced, well-flavoured game stock used in small quantity to sharpen a sauce. Substitute a few tablespoons of reduced game or dark chicken stock; the brown sauce carries the body.
Turned mushrooms"Turned" means the caps are pared into shallow spiral flutes with a knife, a purely decorative operation. Small whole caps, or quartered larger ones as Ranhofer allows, work identically.
GlazingTo glaze means brushing with reduced meat glaze (glace de viande) for shine, or passing the assembled vol-au-vents briefly under a very hot broiler. Do not let the fried lid sit in the oven or it softens.
TruffleA one-inch round of black truffle was a routine garnish in a Delmonico's kitchen and is now a serious expense. Preserved truffle peelings pressed into a round, or simply a fluted mushroom cap, keep the visual logic without the outlay.
Assembly and yieldEverything can be prepared separately and held: cases baked, quenelles poached and crumbed, ragout warm. Fill only at the last moment or the pastry goes soft. Ranhofer files these among the small entrees of a long menu, but gives no yield or count per person.

A Little History

This comes from The Epicurean (1894), Charles Ranhofer's enormous compendium of the cooking he directed at Delmonico's in New York, and it shows the book's method exactly: a dish defined almost entirely by references to numbered preparations elsewhere in the volume, written for cooks in a brigade who already knew how to make brown sauce and quenelle forcemeat. The vol-au-vent itself, a hollow puff-paste case, is generally credited to the early nineteenth-century Parisian pastry tradition and associated by tradition with Carême; the name means roughly "flight in the wind," for the lightness of the risen paste. Ranhofer supplies them under personal names — a la Delmontes, a la Maintenon, and here a la Lucini — a habit of the period in which a garnish combination was fixed by christening it after a patron, a colleague or an occasion. Which Lucini was meant is not recorded. The game forcemeat and truffle place it in autumn or winter, when American restaurant menus leaned heavily on rabbit, hare and wild birds.