No. 2407

Vol-au-Vent of Reedbirds, Diplomate—Small

Petits Vol-au-vent de Mesanges Moustaches a la Diplomate

With six turns of puff paste prepare eight small vol-au-vent crusts (No. 180); after taking them out of the oven detach them from the baking sheet and press on the center of the paste to enlarge the hollow space, and keep them warm. Roast two dozen reedbirds, having them rare; remove the breasts without any bones, suppress the skin and lay them in a small sautoir; mix with them an equal proportion of halved game quenelles, molded with a spoon (No. 155) and poached when wanted in salted water; also add three dozen cooked truffles trimmed into small olive shapes; mix these garnishings with a not too thin but very hot Madeira sauce (No. 492), and with this fill up the warm vol-au-vent crusts; instead of a cover close the apertures with a ring made of puff paste, and in the center have a large Spanish olive standing upright, stuffed with game baking forcemeat (No. 81) and foies-gras. Dress these vol-au-vent on a folded napkin and send them to the table at once.

← No. 2406 Vol-au-Vent, Parisian Style—Small Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2408 Vol-au-Vent of Salmon Trout a la Regence—Sma →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer's cross-referenced numbers point to other pages of The Epicurean, and the central ingredient is no longer legally obtainable in the United States. What follows explains the terms and the obstacle.

The reedbirds"Reedbird" is the market name for the bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivorus), shot by the thousand in the rice and reed marshes of the Atlantic seaboard in Ranhofer's day. It is a protected migratory songbird under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918; killing, possessing, or selling one is a federal offense, and no lawful commercial source exists. The dish cannot be made as written. Cook from a current recipe instead.
Rare small game and the birds' interiorEven setting the law aside, the method depends on roasting the birds rare and lifting the breasts off raw-centered; small birds of this kind were often cooked whole and undrawn in the period, viscera included. That is not a preparation modern food handling supports.
Vol-au-vent, smallEight individual puff-paste cases, not one large one, built from paste given six turns (six foldings, i.e. fully laminated). Ranhofer's instruction to press down the inside of the case immediately out of the oven, while the crumb is still soft, is the step that makes the hollow deep enough to hold a filling; done cold it shatters.
SautoirA straight-sided shallow sauté pan. Here it is only a warming and mixing vessel — the filling is combined off the heat of any real cooking, so the sauce must go in genuinely hot.
Quenelles molded with a spoonForcemeat dumplings shaped between two wet spoons and poached in salted water at a bare shiver, never a boil, or they break up. 'Halved' most likely means split after poaching, though Ranhofer does not say so.
Truffles trimmed to olivesThree dozen small turned truffles for eight portions is a quantity that belonged to a restaurant kitchen with a standing truffle supply; it is not a proportion any home cook would attempt now.
Madeira sauceA Madeira sauce of this period is an espagnole -- a long-reduced brown sauce -- finished with Madeira. 'Not too thin' matters: a loose sauce soaks the case from the inside, and the dish is sent out at once.
The olive on topIn place of a pastry lid, a ring of puff paste closes the opening and a large Spanish olive, stuffed with game forcemeat and foie gras, stands upright in the middle. It is garnish and signature rather than substance.

A Little History

Ranhofer's French title, mésanges moustaches, borrows a European reed-dwelling bird's name for an American one: the reedbird of Chesapeake and Carolina markets was the bobolink, netted and shot in enormous numbers during its autumn migration through the rice fields, when it had fattened enough to be sold by the dozen as a luxury. Nineteenth-century American restaurants treated it as the native equivalent of the European ortolan, and it appears repeatedly in The Epicurean (1894), the record of Charles Ranhofer's decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York. The suffix à la diplomate signals the register rather than a fixed formula — truffles, quenelles, Madeira, foie gras, the vocabulary of a diplomatic dinner. The market that supplied these birds was among the trades that the plume-and-game campaigns of the 1890s and 1900s set out to end, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act closed it; recipes like this one now read chiefly as evidence of how much wild bird a single city's kitchens once consumed.