Napoleons
Bake three sheets of pastry, pricking before baking. Put between the sheets Cream Filling; spread top with Confectioner's Frosting, sprinkle with pistachio nuts blanched and chopped, crease in pieces about two and one-half by four inches, and cut with sharp knife.
Fannie Farmer assumes you already know her puff paste, cream filling and confectioner's frosting from earlier pages. Here is what those cross-references contain and where the assembly can go wrong.
- The pastry"Sheets of pastry" here almost certainly means her rolled puff paste, though the recipe itself neither names it nor gives a thickness. An all-butter commercial puff sheet works; roll it thin, dock it all over with a fork as the recipe directs, and chill it before it goes in.
- Keeping the layers flatNapoleons need thin, even sheets, not high-risen ones. Bake between two parchment-lined sheet pans with a wire rack or second pan on top so the puff is restrained, at 425F for 15 to 20 minutes, until deep gold all the way through. Pale puff is raw puff and will collapse under the filling.
- Cream fillingFarmer's cream filling is a pastry cream: scalded milk, sugar, flour or cornstarch, egg, vanilla. It must come to a full boil and be held there a minute or so, or the starch will not set and the flour taste will remain. Chill it thoroughly with plastic on the surface before it goes between the sheets.
- Confectioner's frostingThis is a plain glaze, not buttercream: confectioners' sugar loosened with a little hot water or milk and flavoured with vanilla, thin enough to pour but thick enough to hold a line. Spread it on the top sheet before assembly, while that sheet is still on the bench and easy to handle.
- Blanching pistachiosPour boiling water over shelled nuts, stand a minute, drain, and rub off the skins in a towel. The recipe asks only for them "blanched and chopped"; the effect is the green of the peeled kernel, where skin-on pistachios look brown against white icing.
- Crease, then cutThe hinge of the whole thing. Score the frosted top sheet into portions before stacking, so you are not driving a knife through set icing and three layers of pastry at once. Assemble, chill until firm, then cut down through the scored lines with a long serrated knife in a sawing motion, wiping between cuts.
- TimingFilled Napoleons soften within a few hours. Bake the pastry a day ahead if you like and keep it dry at room temperature, but fill no more than three or four hours before serving.
- YieldTwo and a half by four inches is a substantial pastry. The recipe gives no yield; how many you get depends entirely on the size of the three sheets you roll, since each finished piece needs three layers.
Napoleons are the American name for what French bakers call mille-feuille, a thousand leaves: layered puff paste with cream between and a glazed top. The name is generally traced not to the emperor but to napolitain, the adjective for Naples, though the connection is traditional rather than documented and the pastry itself is firmly Parisian in form. In the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book the recipe sits among the puff paste recipes in the pastry chapter. Her treatment is characteristically terse, leaning on cross-references to cream filling and confectioner's frosting elsewhere in the book, on the assumption that a cook working through the volume had already mastered both. It reflects the book's purpose as a school text, where the pupil learned components first and combinations after.