Home › The Principles of Cookery › NEAPOLITAN SWEETMEATS (a dish for a Juvenile party)
NEAPOLITAN SWEETMEATS (a dish for a Juvenile party)
Roll out some good puff-paste to the thickness of a quarter of an inch. Stamp it out in rounds, diamonds, or any shapes that may be preferred, remembering only to have an equal number of each shape. Place these on a floured baking-sheet, and bake in a quick oven. When cold spread a thick layer of different coloured jams upon half of them, press the other halves on the top, and garnish with a little piping of pink and white icing. Time, ten minutes to bake. Probable cost, 2s. per pound.
A sandwich biscuit made from puff pastry rather than dough, assembled cold. The whole thing depends on getting matched pairs that bake flat enough to sit together.
- Quick ovenRead this as 425-450F (220-230C). Puff paste needs the initial blast to turn its water to steam and lift the layers; a moderate oven leaks the butter out and gives you greasy, dense rounds. Ten minutes is realistic at that heat for quarter-inch pieces, but watch from eight.
- Bought pastry worksAn all-butter frozen puff pastry, thawed, is a fair substitute for "good puff-paste" and saves the several hours of turns and rests the original assumes. Roll it to a good 6 mm (the original's quarter inch) and keep it cold right up to the moment it goes in the oven.
- Cut cleanly, and stamp coldPress the cutter straight down without twisting; twisting seals the cut edge and the layers will not rise. Chill the stamped shapes on the sheet for 15 minutes before baking so they hold their outline.
- Get flat topsFree-risen puff domes and will not sandwich neatly. Either press each biscuit lightly with a palette knife the moment it leaves the oven while still pliable, or bake under a second sheet pan for the last few minutes for a level, even crumb.
- Jam needs to be stiffLoose jam soaks the pastry within an hour. Use thick preserves, or reduce a runny jam in a small pan for a couple of minutes and cool it fully. For the "different coloured" jams, contrasting preserves such as raspberry, apricot and greengage will give colour without anything added.
- The piping is royal icingIcing that will hold a fine line means egg white beaten with sifted icing sugar to a stiff, glossy paste, a little tinted pink. If raw egg white is a concern, use dried egg white powder or meringue powder, which behaves much the same.
- Assemble lateBake and cool the shells in advance, but fill and pipe no more than two or three hours before serving. Once sandwiched they soften steadily and are stale-tasting by the next day.
- Yield and costA 500 g block of puff pastry rolled to this thickness gives roughly 40 small shapes, so about 20 finished sweetmeats. "2s. per pound" is the book's own estimate of what the dish would cost, not an instruction; ignore it.
Cassell's marks this as a dish for a juvenile party, which places it in a specific late-Victorian ritual: the children's tea, with its own repertoire of small, bright, hand-sized things that could be eaten standing up. The name is loose. "Neapolitan" in nineteenth-century English confectionery often meant something other than anything traceable to Naples; it was commonly a term for layered or many-coloured sweets, the same usage that gave us Neapolitan ice cream in its tricolour stripes, and here it simply signals the assortment of coloured jams, though the link to Neapolitan and Italian confectioners is not so cleanly severed. The recipe also shows how thoroughly puff paste had moved from the professional pastry-cook's bench into the domestic kitchen, helped by commercially made jams in a range of colours that a household would once have had to put up itself.