Vol au vents

Quote: JerryChicken "...My most important job of the day was at 10am, make another pot of coffee and then nip out of the fire escape door, down the metal escape ladder to the sandwich shop where they took delivery of a couple of dozen pork pies at 10 on the dot every day from the butchers across the road, sometimes those pies were too hot to carry.
I can't tell you how many building plans were totally ruined by some idiot (me) biting into a red hot growler and spilling liquid gelatine and fat all over the desk As a mechanical engineering apprentice, I spent about three months in the heat treatment department.
One of the heat treatments done there was annealing, this is where you reduce the hardness and brittleness of steel to make it it machineable and it's done in a furnace that is exactly the right temperature for warming-up pork pies.
It's making me hungry just thinking of that first taste where the molten jelly starts to flow through the bitten crisp pastry ...

Vol au vents on the other hand were pretty dull fare and I only saw them in two places back in them days.
One was weddings, engagement parties etc, as described by Mr J Chicken above.
The other was a cafe in a yard off New St, Huddersfield, that had ideas of modernity, where you could order them covered in baked beans or with a baked potato.
They also sold open sandwiches which, to me, was oxymoronic, how can the filling be sandwiched with only one layer of bread?
And how could they justify charging more for a "sandwich" with less bread?

Whatever you ordered, it came with a "salad garni" ... i.e. an eighth of a tomato, a twisted slice of cucumber and a pinch of cress on a small lettuce leaf.
People fell into two groups, those who carefully avoided eating the garni as they regarded it a decoration and those who ate every bit of it right down to the last filament of the cress, because they'd paid for it and weren't going to waste it.
The garni lives on, although it tends to have a couple of tiny cubes of red pepper in it nowadays.

I remember two women customers in that cafe discussing how best to make vol au vents and one of them swore by Campbells Cream of Mushroom soup.
This was a canned soup that was concentrated and you prepared it (as a soup) by adding an equal amount of water to it and heating.
For a vol au vent filling, this lady spooned it straight from the can, undiluted.
Delicious, she said.