Milfoil Cake, Pompadour

This is an assembly formula rather than a standalone recipe: Ranhofer expects you to have puff paste, English cream, vanilla sugar, strawberry icing and lady bouchées already made from other numbered entries. What follows fills in the parts a modern cook would otherwise have to guess at.

• The hinge: bake the rounds bone-dryPuff paste rounds for a mille-feuille must be rolled thin, docked, and weighted or pressed flat during baking, and taken to a deep amber so they are crisp all the way through. Ranhofer gives no oven temperature; a hot oven, in the region of 400-425F, suits modern equipment. Pale, underbaked layers turn to paste the moment the cream touches them.
• "English cream" is not whipped creamCreme anglaise (No. 42) is a stirred custard, pourable and far too loose to hold puff pastry layers apart. In practice a proper pastry cream, or a creme anglaise set with a little gelatine, is what will let you pare the sides of the cake without the filling sliding out.
• SalpiconIn pastry work a salpicon is simply a fine dice, here candied fruits in one-eighth inch cubes soaked in kirsch. Drain them well before scattering, or the syrup will bleed into the custard.
• CornetA cornet is a paper piping cone rolled from parchment, snipped at the tip. Nothing else is needed for the pale pink piping; a small star tip in a bag does the same work.
• "Pare it round"The layered cake is chilled firm, then the ragged edges trimmed with a long serrated knife in single sawing strokes so the strata show cleanly on the cut face. Do this before the whipped cream dome goes on.
• "A flat"The flat is a flat serving board or platter, not a baking sheet. Ranhofer wants it two inches wider than the cake overall -- roughly an inch of margin on each side -- so the strawberry icing and red sugar read as a border, with the lady bouchees (small iced sponge cakes or petits fours, No. 3376) ranged against the base.
• ColouringPale pink and red sugar in 1894 generally meant cochineal or carmine. Ordinary food colouring does the job; a spoonful of strawberry puree or freeze-dried strawberry powder tints whipped cream without thinning it.
• Pistachio filletsThin green slivers, cut lengthwise from blanched, skinned pistachios. Blanching in boiling water for a minute and rubbing off the skins is what gives the bright green Ranhofer is after.
• Timing and yieldAssemble as close to service as possible: puff pastry begins to soften within an hour or two of meeting custard. Ranhofer gives no diameter or yield, referring instead to No. 3248 for the size; a cake built on 8-inch rounds would serve roughly ten to twelve as an entremet.