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Neapolitan Pastry
Make a rich puff paste, roll it out to about one-half inch in thickness, and cut it into strips about two inches wide; lay these on a baking-dish, a little distance from each other so that when they spread they will not join, and bake in a quick oven. Remove and mask half of them with raspberry or strawberry jam, and place the other half on top. Ice them with colored icing, arrange tastefully on a fancy dish, and serve.
A jam-filled puff pastry slice, essentially a mille-feuille made in strips rather than rounds. The recipe assumes you already know how to make puff paste, and gives no oven number or yield.
- "Quick oven"425-450F. Puff paste needs high initial heat so the water in the butter layers turns to steam and lifts the dough; a moderate oven melts the butter out and gives flat, greasy pastry.
- Half an inch is thickHalf-inch puff paste will rise to two inches or more and bake unevenly. Rolling to about a quarter inch gives a strip that cooks through and still lifts well. Chill the rolled strips before they go in the oven.
- "Rich puff paste"Full puff, roughly equal weights of butter and flour, with six turns. All-butter commercial puff pastry is a fair substitute; the rolled-margarine kind will not taste like anything Oscar served.
- Baking-dish means baking sheetA flat tray, not a deep dish. Line it with parchment and leave a good inch between strips; the recipe says only "a little distance," but warns that they must not join as they spread.
- Dock the topsNot stated in the original but standard practice: prick the strips with a fork or lay a second sheet lightly over them so they rise evenly enough to stack. Wildly domed strips will not sit flat on each other.
- Assemble lateJam softens pastry within an hour or two. Bake, cool, and fill close to serving; iced and filled slices do not keep overnight.
- Colored icingA simple water icing, confectioners' sugar with a little water or lemon juice, tinted. It should be thick enough to set without running down the sides.
- YieldThe recipe gives neither a quantity of paste nor a length for the strips, so the yield is open. A pound of puff paste rolled to a quarter inch gives roughly fifty inches of two-inch strip; how many finished slices that makes depends entirely on how long you cut each piece.
"Neapolitan" in nineteenth-century confectionery usually meant layers, often layers of contrasting color, and the word attached itself to everything from block ice cream to these jam-filled pastry strips; the association is generally traced to Italian confectioners working in Paris and London, though the link to Naples itself is loose. The dish belongs to the same family as the French mille-feuille, and its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) reflects the Waldorf's kitchen brigade, which was organized on French lines. The instruction to "arrange tastefully on a fancy dish" is characteristic of the book: Oscar was a maître d'hôtel rather than a chef, and presentation gets as much attention as method.