Mille-feuille

• 1. Introduction

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  Mille-feuille is a French pastry whose name means a thousand sheets. Made the traditional way, with puff pastry folded six times in threes, it contains 729 layers. Yet the dessert answers to many names. In North America and across the post-Soviet countries it carries the name of an emperor, while in the United Kingdom it is a vanilla slice or a custard slice. How did one stack of pastry and cream collect so many identities? Who first wrote down a recipe, what did cooks put inside it before cream arrived, and why did bakers on every continent keep reshaping it to suit their own tables?

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• 2. Anatomy Of A Slice

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  Three sheets of puff pastry, called pâte feuilletée in French, form the backbone of a classic mille-feuille. Between them sit two layers of crème pâtissière, the thick pastry cream at the dessert's heart.

  The top sheet is where bakers show off. It may carry whipped cream, a dusting of icing sugar or cocoa, pastry crumbs, or sliced almonds. Others glaze it with icing or fondant. A favourite finish is alternating stripes of white icing and brown chocolate, combed into a marbled pattern.

  Fruit often joins the cream. Strawberry and raspberry are the usual choices.

  The layer count is not fixed either. Some modern recipes push the pastry as far as 2,048 layers, far past the traditional total.

  But the cream-filled slice is a fairly late arrival. The earliest recorded versions were sweetened with something quite different.

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• 3. Jam Before Cream

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  The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets places mille-feuille recipes from 17th century French and 18th century English cookbooks among the ancestors of the layer cake. The name itself first turns up in 1733, in an English-language cookbook by a French chef named Vincent La Chapelle. His version was stuffed with jam and marmalade, not cream.

  The first French mention followed in 1749, in a cookbook by Menon. His instructions called for five cakes of puff pastry, all the same size and about as thick as two coins. The last cake was to have a hole cut in the middle, shaped like a Knight's cross. The cook stacked the cakes with jams between them, then iced everything white so the stack looked like a single piece. Red currant jelly, candied lemon skins and pistachio were suggested as decoration.

  After that, the word vanishes from 18th century recipe books. Even so, during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte, several of the fanciest pastry shops in Paris appear to have sold the cake. Through the 19th century, recipes kept describing a jam filling. The one exception came in 1876, when Urbain Dubois served his version with Bavarian cream.

  The form that people eat today was shaped by improvements from the chef Marie-Antoine Carême. As for where the stacked design began, Alan Davidson, writing in the Oxford Companion to Food, says the invention of the form, though not of the pastry itself, is usually credited to Szeged in Hungary. There a caramel-coated version is called Szegediner Torte.

  Hungary is only the first of many countries to claim a version as its own.

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• 4. The Emperor's Name

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  In 1912, Russia marked one hundred years since its victory over Napoleon in the Patriotic War of 1812, and bakers sold triangular pastries shaped like his bicorne hat. The many layers were meant to stand for La Grande Armée. A cake called Napoleon had already appeared in Russian literature in the first half of the 19th century. Alexander Bestuzhev put such names down to the romantic and historicist spirit of the age.

  The recipe was revisited in 1925 by the pastry chef Adrien Artigarrède. He added almonds from Crimea and a top of icing sugar, meant to recall the snows that helped Russia defeat the emperor. The cake later became a standard dessert in Soviet cuisine. It remains one of the most popular cakes in Russia and other post-Soviet countries, usually with more layers than the French original but the same height. It even appears in the novel A Gentleman in Moscow, as a special treat for one of its characters.

  The emperor's name spread well beyond Russia. In Sweden and Finland the pastry is Napoleonbakelse, in Denmark napoleonskage, and in Norway napoleonskake. Poland calls it napoleonka, and Lithuanians say Napoleonas. Hong Kong uses the Chinese characters 拿破侖, and Iran says Shirini-ye Nâpeloni, literally a Napoleonic sweet pastry. Portugal turns out to be the most tangled case. Around Lisbon, the French version is mil-folhas, a direct translation. In the centre and north, it is napoleão, a transliteration of the emperor's name. In the north, mil-folhas instead means the Russian variant, which Lisbon calls russo or russo folhado.

  France itself complicates the story. A French pastry called Napoleon is something different: two joined layers of puff pastry filled with frangipane. What each country puts inside, however, varies even more than what it calls the cake.

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• 5. Local Fillings

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  In Argentina and Uruguay, the pastry becomes rogel. Puff pastry alternates with dulce de leche, and a meringue glaze crowns the top. It is considered a classic and a favourite at weddings.

  Australia's vanilla slice uses a crème pâtissière set with gelatin, often under passionfruit icing. New Zealanders choose among custard slice, custard square, vanilla slice and passion-fruit slice. In the Netherlands and Belgium, the equivalent is the tompouce. Dutch bakers keep it nearly unchanged, with two pastry layers and pink glazing, which turns orange around national festivities. The cartoon character Tom Puss, created by Marten Toonder, takes his name from it.

  Iran's version is built from thin puff pastry, rose water, pistachios and saffron-scented whipped cream. Italy's mille foglie often adds a layer of sponge cake, so the order runs puff pastry, sponge, strawberries and cream, then pastry again. In Spain, the milhojas can climb to 6 inches tall, though northern versions keep to three or four pastry layers with cream. In Hong Kong, the filling is buttercream, meringue and walnuts. Across mainland China, bakeries vary, but often use a sponge cake and buttercream filling between rough puff pastry made with vegetable shortening.

  Some cooks drop the pastry altogether. A French Canadian method swaps puff pastry for graham crackers and pudding for custard. Japan keeps two separate forms. The mirufīyu has two or three layers with custard cream and sliced strawberries. The extravagant Napoleon Pie has three layers and is rimmed on all four sides with sliced almonds. In the Philippines, the napoleones are made with two or three layers and a sugar glaze. They are a specialty of Negros Island, especially around Silay City and Bacolod City, where visitors buy them as pasalubong, a gift brought home from a trip.

  In Morocco, nobody bothers with a local name. Mille-feuille is eaten regularly there under its original French one.

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