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Mille-Feuilles Cakes
Roll out two pounds of rich puff paste, cut it into sixteen pieces marking each one in the center where a piece is to be removed, place them in a moderate oven, and bake. Take them out when done, lift off the centers, fill them with any kind of jam, replace the centers, pile the pieces one on top of another, and the cake is then ready for serving.
A terse Waldorf note that assumes the reader already knows how to handle puff paste. Two things need attention before you start: the oven temperature, and what "pile the pieces one on top of another" actually asks for.
- The hinge: oven heatThe recipe says only "moderate oven"; no temperature is given anywhere. "Moderate" is conventionally read today as about 350F, which is too cool to make laminated pastry rise properly u2014 the butter melts out before the steam can lift the layers. Bake puff paste at 400-425F until fully coloured and dry, then lower the heat if the tops are browning ahead of the centres.
- Two pounds of puff pasteAbout 900 g, or two standard 1 lb packages of all-butter frozen puff pastry. Oscar's kitchen made its own; there is no shame in buying it, but choose butter rather than shortening for the flavour this recipe depends on.
- "Marking each one in the center"Score a lid into each piece with the tip of a knife, cutting perhaps halfway through and no further. After baking, that scored circle lifts off cleanly as a cap and leaves a hollow beneath — the same method used for vol-au-vent cases.
- Sixteen piecesThe shape is not specified. Rounds cut with a 3 in cutter are the usual reading; squares of similar size work identically. Cut with a single decisive press and do not twist the cutter, or the edges seal and the layers will not climb.
- Chill before bakingCut shapes should go into the oven cold, straight from the refrigerator, on a parchment-lined sheet. Warm, relaxed pastry rises unevenly and the lids come out crooked.
- The jamAny thick preserve does; the recipe specifies nothing beyond "any kind of jam." A loose jam will soak into the pastry within the hour; reduce a watery one in a pan and cool it before filling.
- "Pile the pieces one on top of another"Read literally this builds a single tall stack of sixteen filled cases, which is unstable and unservable. The workable interpretation is to serve them as individual filled pastries, or to stack two or three per portion. If you want a true layered mille-feuille, bake flat rectangles under a weighted second sheet instead of scoring lids.
- Yield and timingSixteen pastries, so eight to sixteen servings depending on how they are stacked. Fill within an hour or two of serving; assembled early, they go soft.
Mille-feuille means "thousand leaves" — the name describes the count of paper-thin layers that lamination produces, not any particular filling, which is why the recipe is content to say "any kind of jam." The classic Parisian form is flat rectangles of puff paste layered with pastry cream and glazed on top; what Oscar describes here is closer to a small filled case with a lifted lid, the technique a hotel kitchen would already have been using nightly for vol-au-vents. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, compiled his book in the 1890s largely as a working reference, and the brevity shows: it is written for cooks who knew puff paste from long practice and needed only the assembly reminded to them. The vagueness about oven heat is characteristic of the period, when ranges had no thermometers and "moderate" was a judgement made by hand and eye rather than a number.