Name: To Make a Vol-au-vent Case
Ingredients: 1 pound puff pastry; 1 beaten egg; butter for greasing

Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

To Make a Vol-au-vent Case

Ingredients

1 pound puff pastry
1 beaten egg
butter for greasing

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the pastry

Prepare puff pastry according to the recipe on page 263.
Give the pastry six turns and roll it out to ¾ inch thick.
Cut an oval piece of pastry to your desired size.

Shape and bake

Place the oval on a buttered baking sheet and brush the surface and sides with the beaten egg.
Mark an interior oval, leaving a 1-inch margin, and cut to a depth of ¼ inch.
Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until risen, then remove the inner oval.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together118,967 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Puff pastry: Its laminated layers of butter and dough puff into flaky, airy walls when baked.
Beaten egg: Brushed on as a wash, it promotes browning and a glossy golden surface.

The step that matters

Marking and cutting the inner oval. Cutting only to a depth of ¼ inch scores the pastry so it rises into a hollow case; cutting too deep or through the base stops the walls from rising evenly, and brushing egg onto the cut edges can glue layers together and hinder rise.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.