Palm Leaves
Roll remnants of puff paste one-eighth inch thick; sprinkle one-half surface with powdered sugar, fold, press edges together, pat and roll out, using sugar fo. dredging board; repeat three times. After the last rolling fold four times. The pastry should be in long strip one and one-half inches wide. From the end, cut pieces one inch wide; place on baking-sheet, broad side down, one inch apart, and separate layers of pastry at one end to suggest a leaf. Bake eight minutes in hot oven; these will spread while baking.
These are palmiers, built from puff paste trimmings rather than a fresh sheet. The whole recipe turns on sugar, which is both the flavouring and the rolling medium, and which will burn in the time it takes to answer the door.
- "Powdered sugar" is not confectioners' sugarIn American cookbooks of this period powdered sugar generally meant a fine grade of granulated sugar, with pulverized or XXXX sugar being the finer powder. Fine granulated or caster sugar is the closer match; modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and behaves differently on the sheet.
- Hot oven means 425-450FHot oven -- the book gives no temperature in degrees; "hot oven" is conventionally equated with roughly 425-450F today. Eight minutes is realistic at that heat, but palmiers colour on the bottom first, so it is worth checking them at about five minutes.
- Line the sheetThe sugar melts and runs. Parchment or a silicone mat makes the baked leaves far easier to lift off.
- Working with remnantsPuff paste scraps have already lost their neat lamination. Stack the pieces flat on top of one another rather than balling them up, and keep everything cold; if the butter softens, chill the strip for twenty minutes before cutting.
- The folding is compressedThe instruction to "fold four times" after the last rolling is usually read as the palmier shape: fold both long edges in to meet at the centre, then fold the two halves together like a book. The recipe itself specifies the finished strip as one and one-half inches wide, but does not spell out how the folds arrive there.
- Cutting and spacingOne-inch pieces laid cut side down will roughly double in width. Two inches apart is safer than the one inch given, or the leaves fuse at the edges.
- YieldNo yield is stated, and it depends entirely on how much puff paste trimming is left over; they are best the day they are baked and go soft in a covered tin.
Palmiers take their name from the palm leaf their splayed layers are meant to suggest, and the form is generally traced to French pâtisserie, where sugared puff-paste trimmings were rolled, folded and cut rather than thrown out. That thrift is the point of the recipe's placement here: it opens with remnants of puff paste, and turns a laborious, butter-heavy dough into a second batch of something. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School book was written for a readership learning pastry by measured method rather than by apprenticeship.