No. 2405

Vol-au-Vent of Oysters a la Maintenon—Small

Petits Vol-au-vent d'Huitres a la Maintenon

Set into a saucepan some fresh butter and lemon juice, place it over a hot fire, and add to it some fine raw oysters; after poaching and draining them cut them into pieces, return to the saucepan and season with nutmeg, pepper and salt, and then add some pike quenelles (No. 90); also some cut-up truffles and mushrooms; add a little veloute sauce (No. 415) and thicken it just when ready to serve with raw egg-yolks diluted with a little cream and fine butter. Fill the small vol-au-vent crusts with this, keeping all very warm, put on the cover and serve on a folded napkin.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with stock, velouté and quenelle forcemeat already standing by. Read it as an assembly recipe: nearly all the work is in the components, and the hinge is not overcooking either the oysters or the finishing liaison.

Poach the oysters barely"Poaching" here means dropping shucked oysters into the hot butter and lemon juice only until the edges ruffle, roughly 30 seconds to a minute. Anything approaching a simmer of several minutes leaves them rubbery, and they will get a second warming in the sauce.
The egg-yolk liaisonYolks slackened with cream and butter are stirred in off the heat, or over the barest heat, and must not boil or they will curdle into scrambled threads. Ranhofer's "just when ready to serve" is the whole instruction: this filling cannot be held or reheated once finished.
Cross-references you will have to supplyNo. 90 is the pike quenelle forcemeat: a pounded fish forcemeat of the usual kind, poached in small shaped dumplings. No. 415 is Ranhofer's velouté, a blond roux-based white sauce; a well-reduced fish velouté suits this filling. Any good version of either will do.
Small vol-au-ventThese are what a modern kitchen calls bouchées: puff-pastry cases about two inches across with a lid cut from the top. All-butter frozen puff pastry, baked at 400F until well risen and dry inside, is a reasonable stand-in; hollow out any raw dough from the centre before filling.
Truffles and mushroomsTruffle was a routine garnish in Delmonico's kitchen and is now a luxury purchase. Sautéed cremini or a small quantity of rehydrated dried mushroom carries the earthy note; a few drops of truffle oil is not the same thing but is closer than nothing.
SeasoningNutmeg is meant in a grating or two, not a spoonful. Salt lightly — oyster liquor, velouté and reduced stock are all salty already, and the filling reduces slightly as it thickens.
Yield and serviceRanhofer gives no quantities; as a working estimate, about 24 oysters with a cup of velouté and a dozen small quenelles will fill roughly 12 bouchées, enough for six as a first course. The folded napkin on the platter is standard period presentation for such small pastry items.

A Little History

This is from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of his thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, where French haute cuisine was served to Americans who could afford it. The tag à la Maintenon is generally traced to Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon, second wife of Louis XIV, and by the nineteenth century it had attached itself loosely to dishes finished in a rich white sauce, most famously lamb chops cooked in paper. Ranhofer's use of it here is that of a professional cataloguer rather than a historian: The Epicurean runs through a long sequence of vol-au-vent fillings, each distinguished by its garnish, so that a chef could open the book and find a name for whatever the larder held. That oysters appear so freely — poached, in quenelles, in patties, in soups — reflects how cheap and abundant they were in New York waters before the beds were fished out and polluted in the early twentieth century.