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Vol Au Vent, Dieppoise
Prepare and keep hot a vol au vent. Place in a saucepan twenty-four cooked shelled shrimps, eighteen freshly opened little neck clams without the liquor, twelve whole canned mushrooms and one small sliced truffle. Tie in a bunch two branches parsley and two branches chervil and add to pan, moisten with a gill white wine and two gills broth. Season with half teaspoon salt, saltspoon cayenne pepper and saltspoon grated nutmeg, lightly shuffle pan, cover and simmer ten minutes. Mix in another saucepan one ounce butter with one and a half ounces flour, heat half minute, then strain liquor from the other pan into this, continually mix until it comes to a boil and boil five minutes. Dilute an egg yolk in half gill cream, add it to sauce, and sharply mix with a whisk while cooking one minute. Remove the bouquet, pour sauce into other pan with ingredients, and lightly mix. Place the vol au vent on a hot dish, fill up with the preparation, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over, place the cover on and serve.
A classic French seafood ragout in a pastry case, written for a cook who already knows how to build a vol-au-vent. The measurements are Edwardian and the timing needs rethinking.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so the moistening liquid is 1/2 cup white wine and 1 cup broth, with 1/4 cup cream for the liaison. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon.
- The vol-au-ventThis is a tall puff pastry case with a lid, baked blind and kept warm. Rolled and cut from a sheet of all-butter frozen puff pastry it works perfectly well; a 7-inch case holds this filling and serves four.
- Do not simmer the shellfish ten minutesThe shrimp are already cooked and the clams are raw and small. Ten minutes in wine and broth turns both to rubber. Bring the liquid, aromatics, mushrooms and truffle to a bare simmer for the ten minutes, then add the clams for two to three minutes until they just firm, and fold the shrimp in only at the end with the sauce.
- Little necks without the liquorThe recipe wants them shucked raw, drained of their juice. If you shuck your own, the reserved liquor is worth adding to the broth in place of some of it, though it will make the seasoning saltier than the half teaspoon of salt allows for.
- The roux is deliberately stiffOne ounce butter (2 tablespoons) to 1 1/2 ounces flour (about 6 tablespoons) for 1 1/2 cups of liquid gives a very thick velouté, which is what keeps the filling from flooding the pastry. Cook it the full five minutes after it boils or it will taste of raw flour.
- The egg liaisonOnce the yolk and cream go in, the sauce must not return to a boil or it will curdle. One minute of hard whisking off the strong heat is all it needs.
- Canned mushrooms and truffleCanned whole button mushrooms were readily available and often called for in professional recipes of this period, and drain-and-add is genuinely convenient here; fresh buttons, sautéed first, are better. The truffle is garnish and flavour perfume, not structure, and the dish works without it.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh. A few sprigs of tarragon plus extra parsley in the bouquet gives a similar faintly aniseed lift; dried chervil contributes almost nothing.
À la dieppoise means in the manner of Dieppe, the Normandy fishing port on the Channel, and in French kitchen usage it denotes a white wine sauce garnished with shellfish — classically mussels and shrimp, often with mushrooms. That this version reaches for freshly opened little neck clams instead of mussels suggests it was written for an American market, where clams were abundant and cheap and mussels were comparatively little eaten. The vol-au-vent, whose name translates literally as 'flight in the wind' for the lightness of the puff pastry, is popularly credited to Antonin Carême, though the term is attested before his career; by the turn of the twentieth century a hot pastry case filled with a creamy ragout at the moment of service was a familiar hotel and club dish. Recipes of this stamp, precise to the count of shrimp and the saltspoon of nutmeg, read as instructions to a professional cook with a stocked larder rather than to a home kitchen.