vol-au-vent

English edit

Alternative forms edit

vol au vent

Etymology edit

Unadapted borrowing from French vol-au-vent (“windblown”, literally “flight in the wind”).

Pronunciation edit

(UK) IPA^(key): /ˌvɒl.oˈvɑ̃/
(UK, Anglicised) IPA^(key): /vɒl.əˈvɒnt/

Noun edit

vol-au-vent (plural vol-au-vent or vol-au-vents or vols-au-vent)

A small circular piece of puff pastry with a hole for various fillings, such as mushrooms, prawns, fruit, cheese, etc.
- 2007 March 13, Ashley Pharoah, Life on Mars, Season 2, Episode 4:
  Ray Carling: Some nicely chilled Blue Nun and some vol-au-vents? This is Manc the Knife, is it?...
  Chris Skelton: What's a vol-au-vent?...
  Ray: It's a puff pastry shell filled with a savory meat mixture...
  Chris: You mean a pie, then?
- 2009, Ruth Hamilton, The Reading Room, Macmillan, →ISBN, page 342:
  A few offered to come for me, but they’re all up to their eyes in flans and vols-au-vent and God knows what else, so I told them I’d made my own arrangements.
- 2016, Cancún & the Riviera Maya with Cozumel & the Best of the Yucatán, 4th edition, Fodor’s Travel, →ISBN, page 147:
  Classic bistro fare—including quiche Lorraine and vols-au-vent—make for a light lunch comme il faut.
- 2016, James Swallow, Nomad, Zaffre Publishing, →ISBN, page 237:
  Predictably, the result was an immediate surge of panic as the embassy’s guests discarded their vols-au-vent and sought to put as much distance as they could between the outbreak of ‘fire’ and themselves.
- 2018 January 9, Martin Daubney, “Pale, male and stale: is being a white man now bad for your career?”, in The Telegraph‎^[1]:
  Want to get heads rotating at your next dinner party or drinks get-together? Try tabling the morsel, “has there ever been a worse time to be a middle-aged white man in the world of work?” and watch the vol-au-vents fly.