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Vol Au Vent of Godiveaux
Prepare a vol au vent and keep hot. Finely chop a pound and a half lean, raw, sinewless veal with a pound of well-picked, fresh beef-kidney suet; place in a bowl, cover with a cloth and bury it in ice for one hour. Place the hash in a cold mortar and pound to a paste, season with a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper, a saltspoon grated nutmeg and saltspoon ground mixed allspice, adding three egg-yolks; pound again for five minutes, place on a lightly floured table, then make small balls the size of cherries and plunge in a pint and a half boiling broth; boil for two minutes, drain on a sieve and keep the broth.
Mix in a saucepan a half ounce butter with one ounce flour and heat for a half minute. Strain the broth into this pan, add a half gill cream, season with a half teaspoon salt and one saltspoon each cayenne pepper and grated nutmeg. Mix until it comes to a boil, let boil for ten minutes, then dilute an egg yolk with a tablespoon cream, add to the sauce, and. mix. while heating for one minute. Add the godiveaux, lightly mix, cook for one minute more; dress the vol au vent on a large dish and pour into the vol au vent, place the cover on and serve.
This is a veal quenelle forcemeat poached in broth, bound with a velouté and served in a puff pastry case. The critical thing is temperature: the veal and suet must stay near freezing until they are pounded, or the fat separates and the balls fall apart in the broth.
- Keep everything coldThe hour buried in ice is not optional padding. Chilled fat emulsifies into the lean meat rather than melting out; if the paste warms and looks greasy, re-chill it before shaping.
- Mortar or machineA food processor does the pounding in under a minute. Work in short pulses with the bowl and blade pre-chilled, and stop as soon as the mixture is a smooth, tacky paste.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A gill is half a cup, so half a gill of cream is 4 tablespoons. Two saltspoons of cayenne is half a teaspoon, which is assertive by modern taste; start with a quarter and adjust.
- Beef-kidney suetFresh kidney suet from a butcher, membrane picked away, is what is meant. Packaged shredded suet is dusted with flour and behaves differently; if you use it, expect a firmer, drier quenelle.
- Vol-au-ventA tall puff pastry case with a lid, baked blind. Bought all-butter puff pastry rolled to about 1/4 inch and baked at 425F gives a serviceable shell; keep it in a low oven, uncovered, so it does not go soft while the filling is made.
- Poaching timeTwo minutes will set cherry-sized balls on the outside but leave the centres barely warm. Poach at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil, and give them five to seven minutes, until one cut open is firm and opaque throughout.
- The egg-yolk liaisonOnce the yolk and cream go in, the sauce must not boil or it will curdle. Temper the yolk with a spoonful of hot sauce first, then return it off the heat and warm it gently.
- Test the seasoningRaw forcemeat cannot be tasted. Poach one small ball first, eat it, then correct the salt and spice in the remaining paste.
- YieldA pound and a half of veal with a pound of suet makes a generous quantity of forcemeat, likely more than a single pastry case will hold; the recipe gives no case size or number of servings, so judge both by eye.
Godiveau is the old French kitchen term for a forcemeat of lean veal and kidney suet pounded to a paste, the parent of the quenelle; Carême and later Escoffier both codified versions, and Escoffier's godiveau à la crème follows the same logic of cold fat, cold marble and repeated pounding. The vol-au-vent, whose name means roughly "flight in the wind" for the lightness of the pastry, is generally credited by tradition to Carême's kitchens in early nineteenth-century Paris, though the shell had antecedents in earlier raised pastry cases. A recipe like this one appears in English-language cookbooks because the professional French repertoire was still the standard against which ambitious American hostesses measured themselves: the mortar, the ice, and the pint and a half of broth all assume a kitchen with staff and time.