Why everyone’s talking about... Vol-au-vents
FORGET Abba – another 1970s favourite is enjoying a huge comeback: the vol-au-vent. Just five years ago it was on a list of ‘endangered’ foods that had fallen from favour, but this year Waitrose sold out after a 25 per cent hike in sales. So what’s their story?
Vol-au-vent is French for ‘flying on the wind’, which describes the lightness of the puff pastry. Often filled with creamed chicken, prawn or mushrooms, they have become synonymous with receptions and parties (sorry, ‘gatherings’, as Ministers now call them). But technically the bitesized hors d’oeuvres you’re thinking of are not vol-au-vents at all.
How come?
True vol-au-vents are plate-sized, for sharing. The nibbles are technically mini bouchées à la reine (‘the queen’s mouthfuls’), reputedly created by Marie Leszczynska in 1735 to win back her adulterous husband, Louis XV of France. She took an existing favourite, the sweet dish puits d’amour – or ‘well of love’, a scandalously suggestive name – and filled it with foods thought to be aphrodisiacs. But the mix of lambs’ brains, cocks’ crests, sheep’s testicles, kidneys, truffles, olives and more did not do the job.
Hardly surprising! But they caught on?
Yes, vol-au-vents became a staple of French gastronomy, and in the UK they peaked as a dinner-party staple in the 1970s as Brits developed more continental tastes. But they also became seen as kitsch, mocked in the likes of Mike Leigh’s 1977 socialclimbing satire Abigail’s Party.
And the comeback?
Many 1970s foods are enjoying revivals – such as chicken kiev, prawn cocktail, above, and arctic roll – as people seek the comfort of simpler times, especially in a pandemic, and especially at Christmas.
Fillings are now more creative, too. When chef Jeremy Lee reintroduced vol-au-vents to Soho’s Quo Vadis, he slated the ‘diabolical, dour’ 1970s dish and made less stodgy versions with ingredients such as trout.
And on a celebrity Bake Off in 2016, Samantha Cameron made vol-au-vents filled with crab and shrimp curry, calling them ‘a family favourite’.
If they’re good enough for a baronet’s daughter, they’re surely good enough for anyone.