Home › The World's Kitchen › Vol Au Vent, Mariniere
Vol Au Vent, Mariniere
Place in a saucepan twenty-four large oysters, twelve fresh shrimps, twelve heads canned mushrooms, twelve cooked mussels and six very thin slices of truffles. Pour in one gill white wine, adding half ounce good butter. Season with one teaspoon salt. Cover the pan and place it in a hot oven for ten minutes. Remove from the oven.
Heat in a small saucepan one and a half tablespoons melted butter, adding two tablespoons flour. Stir well, then strain the gravy of the above preparation into the pan. Season with a saltspoon cayenne pepper, whisk briskly with the whisk for two minutes; boil for three minutes, add a Hollandaise sauce mix well for a minute, then add all the contents of the fish pan. Mix well again and heat for two minutes without allowing to boil. Then with the preparation fill a vol au vent. Dress on a dish and serve.
A late-Edwardian restaurant dish: a shellfish ragout bound with roux and Hollandaise, spooned into a puff pastry case at the last moment. Everything hinges on heat control at the end.
- Never let it boil once the Hollandaise is inAfter the egg-and-butter sauce goes in, the mixture must sit below a simmer — around 160-170F. Boiling will curdle the Hollandaise and the sauce will break into greasy flecks. Make the Hollandaise while the shellfish is in the oven so it is warm, not cold, when it joins the roux.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. Use a dry white wine you would drink; the volume is small and it carries much of the seasoning.
- "Hot oven"425-450F. Ten minutes at that heat is for opening flavours and drawing liquid, not for cooking the shellfish through.
- A saltspoonAbout a quarter teaspoon. That is a substantial hit of cayenne for this quantity of sauce; start with half and taste.
- The oysters and shrimpTwenty-four oysters and twelve shrimp will be fully cooked long before the ten minutes are up, and they then face two more heatings. Modern practice is to pull the shellfish out as soon as the oyster edges ruffle and the shrimp turn opaque, hold them aside, and return them to the finished sauce only to warm through — a minute at most. Otherwise the oysters go rubbery and the shrimp tighten to erasers.
- MusselsThe recipe assumes them already cooked and shelled, as from a separate pot of wine and aromatics. Discard any that did not open. A pound or so in the shell should yield twelve good ones, depending on size.
- "Heads" of mushroom and canned truffle"Heads" of mushroom and truffle -- Mushroom heads are simply the caps, drained; small fresh cremini or button caps sauteed briefly are better than canned. Truffle is optional in every practical sense — six thin slices is a garnish-level quantity, and a few drops of truffle oil off the heat is the usual substitute.
- The vol-au-ventA tall puff pastry case with a lid, baked blind and hollowed. A frozen all-butter puff sheet cut into a 7-8 inch double ring will do; bake it fully and dry, and fill only at the table, or the base turns to paste.
- YieldServes four to six as a first course, or four as a light main with nothing but a green salad. It does not hold and does not reheat.
Marini emoules marini e. The vol-au-vent, a hollow case of puff pastry whose name translates as "flight in the wind" for its lightness, is generally traced to the early nineteenth-century Paris kitchens of Antonin Car"me, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. By the time this book was compiled the form had become a standard vehicle for any rich bound ragout: French restaurant grammar was the international style, and a cook was expected to recognise a hollowed pastry case, a roux, and a Hollandaise as ordinary equipment. The ingredient list — oysters, shrimp, mussels and canned mushrooms all in one dish, with truffle shaved over — reflects a moment when oysters were still cheap enough to use two dozen at a time, and canned goods were a mark of modernity rather than compromise.