vol-au-vent

English

Alternative forms

• vol au vent

Etymology

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

Pronunciation

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

Noun

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

1. 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.

Translations

puff pastry with fillings

• Finnish: vannike
• French: vol-au-vent (fr)
• Irish: vol-au-vent m, puthphióg f
• Italian: vol-au-vent
• Swedish: volauvent (sv) c

French

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /vɔ.lo.vɑ̃/

• Audio:

  (file)

Noun

vol-au-vent m (plural vols-au-vent)

1. vol-au-vent (puff pastry with a hole)

   Synonyms: bouchée, timbale

Derived terms

• vol-au-vent à la financière

Descendants

• → English: vol-au-vent
• → Italian: vol-au-vent
• → Swedish: volauvent

Further reading

• “vol-au-vent”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.

Italian

Etymology

Unadapted borrowing from French vol-au-vent.

Noun

vol-au-vent m (invariable)

1. vol-au-vent

Further reading

• vol-au-vent in Treccani.it – Vocabolario Treccani on line, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana