Not Tonight Josephine...

 

I love French Patisserie - I could spend hours looking at the display of cakes and pastries in shops like Patisserie Valerie. Rows of beautiful, identical tartlets, embellished with perfect raspberries, neat rows of piping. Whorls of cream, chocolate shapes, snowy dusting of icing sugar... Sweet pate sable, crisp choux, soft mousse fillings... 

My mouth is watering just thinking about these delights [and my waistline is getting larger] 

In the weird world of synchronicity, patisserie was in my thoughts for two different reasons on the same day recently. 

I was talking to a friend whose son was working reduced hours during lockdown, and got interested in the GBBO. He decided to master various different baking skills. She was telling me that when they visited recently, he had been making mille-feuilles.

Mille-feuilles means one thousand leaves and refers to the three layers of thin, light puff pastry, sandwiched together with cream and jam, and iced with a 'feather' pattern. People argue about the origins - but these have been around since the 16th century, and the name first appeared in an English cookbook, written by a Frenchman. The name is correctly pronounced meel-foy although many English supermarkets and bakeries just call this a cream slice or a custard slice.

Later that evening I was reading my library book. "B is for Burglar". The second of Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone's mysteries. I collected the whole series- then got rid of them, but the library here has plenty so I thought I'd re-read them. She refers to her landlord, a retired pastry chef baking "Napoleons". I just could not remember what they were, so I looked them up. And discovered they are basically* the same as mille-feuilles.

Of course I then fell down a rabbit-hole of patisserie research. Why that name? It appears that nobody really knows. There are three theories

1. That feathered design on the icing looks like a row of capital Ns
2. This was Bonaparte's favourite cake
3. It was first baked by an Italian chef in Naples,**who called it a Napoletano in honour of his city. The French named it Napolitain, and then it was Anglicised to Napoleon.

Personally I find none of these particularly convincing explanations! 

What do you think?

Whatever they are called, they are certainly delicious. 

* Napoleons have a layer of almond paste in them

**Further evidence for the Naples theory comes from the fact that although the ancient Romans didn’t have pastry as French chefs know it today, but they did have layered desserts made with thin cakes or sheets folded together with honey and cream or soft cheese. Called placenta [ugh!], this elegant dessert was the most distant forerunner of the modern napoleon. It also has ties to another nation’s most famous sweet export, Greek baklava, but unlike the other Mediterranean treat, the Roman version always involved a creamy filling instead of or alongside chopped nuts.