You may remember that yesterday I mentioned in passing that I had made puff pastry which I would be using during my morning's cooking today. Many many wonderful things can be made with puff pastry - beef wellington, millefeuille, strudel and gateau pathivier, for example - but today I made a journey back to the days of Ted Heath, industrial action, silly hair, industrial action, oil crises and industrial action - the 1970s - in order to make some of those great culinary treats, vol-au-vents. Yes: I made vol-au-vents.
For the audience under 40 reading this blog, a vol-au-vent is a round puff pastry which is baked so that it puffs up and then filled with whatever you feel like. They haven't been seen since the 70's, having gone the same way as Nixon, community spirit and Keynesian economics. Like Keynes however, I am convinced that they are making a comeback because they are really very good; I filled mine with a creme patisserie and some apple compote: they were delicious and looked so sweetly retro that you couldn't help but like them. I'll admit that their taste would have been better if they had slightly less in the way of colour, it's not that they were burnt - more tanned. In any case, they were very nice and honestly not all that fiddly, certainly when compared to the vast majority of canapes.
In order to make the vol-au-vents, you first roll out and cut your pastry in rather a similar manner to making scones, but it then gets slightly more complicated: to fill the vol-au-vents later on, you will need to have a lid and you achieve this by scoring the pastry in a circle quite deeply. When the pastry rises, the little lid will be quite easy and importantly quite neat to remove so that you can fill the little cases with whatever you want. The easiest way to score them is to take a smaller pastry cutter to the one that you were using and simply press it most of the way down into the pastry but this was not an option for me as I was already using the smallest cutter, so I very carefully scored the tops of them with my knife (having checked to make sure that Darina wasn't watching). It was during this engrossing process that I became aware of a large television camera positioned six inches away from my hands and watching my every move very closely.
At first I thought that Darina might have simply taken a step too far in the surveillance of her students, but it turned out that an American TV chef was doing a programme on Ireland and one of the episodes was to be from Ballymaloe. Apparently one of the cameramen thought that the careful preparation of vol-au-vents would make for riveting viewing during the opening sequence: I wonder if it will make it to the final cut? The one person who I did feel for was another of the students who had the appalling luck to be turning out a Tarte Tatin at the moment that the whole of the crew entered the kitchen: she was surrounded by three cameras, a boom-mike, Darina and the presenter as she turned out the tart with a look of terror. Happily it turned out fine and I am sure that a fine future awaits her as a TV chef.
In other news, I also found the time to cook one of my very favourite foods in the whole wide world - chowder. So much more than a fish soup, a good chowder is a whole, filling meal which can contain just about anything that you have to hand (providing it is fish); on that reasoning, mine contained monkfish, salmon, prawns and mussels (which I left in their shells for aesthetic effect) along with the obligatory potatoes and cream to make a lovely and filling soup. Chowder also manages to endear itself to me because it is so easy to present - with a mussel in its shell and a prawn that I had left whole swimming in the creamy soup with great big chunks of fish in between and a few slices of bread on the side, it looked really quite lovely. And that's an achievement for me.
The only other thing that I was cooking this morning was candied peel (stage two): having soaked the peel overnight in salted water I had to simmer them for three hours in order to soften them before finally candying them. This was in at least one respect wonderful - my section smelt divine all morning because of the peel. It was however also intensely irritating because the pan was always in the way and I had to borrow pans from other people once or twice to make up for the fact that I was using mine. I intend to complete the process on Monday, so I shall report back on my progress then.
I was partnerless today once again because he has a shellfish allergy and the cooking lobsters around the kitchen were making it difficult for him to breathe, but he very kindly saved me the trouble of filleting the salmon before he went. It was a bit quiet without someone to talk to, but I had so much to do that I didn't think too much of it.
The demonstration this afternoon was done by Rory and it is the very last which we will actually be cooking - we have two more on Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning, but they are purely there in order to tie up loose ends. This was the last of the recipes that we would be cooking. And they were all worryingly easy. It was as if we're being given a break for the last morning - nothing too challenging which seems odd given the difficulty of the cooking today. Still, I am sure that they know what they are doing.
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