No. 3248

Milfoil with Preserves

Gateau Mille-Feuilles aux Confitures

This requires some puff paste of twelve turns (No. 146); divide it into six-ounce pieces, roll them out to three-sixteenths of an inch in thickness and cut into rounds seven inches in diameter; lay these on baking sheets slightly moistened with cold water applied with a brush; from the center of each piece remove a two-inch diameter round and leave these to rest in a cold place for half an hour; bestrew lightly with sugar, prick and bake in a slack oven. After taking them out detach from the sheets and lay them at once on grates to get cold, then stand one on top of the other intercalated with a layer either of currant jelly (No. 3670), apricot marmalade or peach marmalade (No. 3675); pare the cake neatly into a perfect round and cover with Italian meringue (No. 140) on the edges. Sprinkle over it a mixture made of equal parts of Mocha sugar (No. 3249), half of which is colored with carmine with a little syrup, chopped almonds, chopped pistachios and currants. Lay the cake on a tart dish and push into a moderate oven for a few moments to dry the meringue without coloring it, then place it on a round made of a three-eighths of an inch thickness of frolle paste (No. 136), and iced over with pink icing (No. 102), strewn with pink sugar (No. 172), it having a border of gum paste or English paste. Dress the milfoil either on a napkin or on a socle, and garnish around with small bounchees filled with currant jelly, these being called Wells of Love (No. 3338).

← No. 3247 Milfoil Cake, Pompadour Large Cakes for Entremets No. 3249 Mocha Cake →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer wrote this for a brigade with numbered recipes on hand; almost every component is a cross-reference. Read it as an assembly plan, and note that the finished object is as much a table piece as a dessert.

What you are actually buildingDiscs of puff pastry, each 7 inches across with a 2-inch hole cut from the centre, baked flat and stacked with jam between the layers. The recipe specifies six-ounce pieces of paste but does not say how many. The hole means the finished cake reads as a ring; the meringue goes only on the outside edge.
Puff paste of twelve turnsNo. 146 is not given here, so exactly how Ranhofer counted his turns cannot be checked from this page. Good all-butter shop puff, given two extra single folds and rested cold, behaves close enough. Roll to 3/16 inch (about 5 mm) and rest the cut discs cold for the full half hour or they will shrink and distort.
The "slack oven" is the hingeRanhofer gives no temperatures; "slack" is conventionally reckoned somewhere around 300-325F, low for puff pastry, and the sugaring is likely why: sugar scorches at high heat before the layers dry. In a modern oven 375F for 15-20 minutes, pricked and weighted lightly with a second sheet, gives crisp flat rounds without caramel-black edges. Do not chase maximum lift here; flat is the point.
Moistened baking sheetBrushing the sheet with cold water rather than greasing it anchors the pastry so it rises straight instead of sliding. Parchment does the same job and is easier to lift from.
Italian meringue, and the drying ovenItalian meringue is boiled sugar syrup beaten into whites; No. 140's exact syrup stage is not quoted here. The final "moderate oven for a few moments" -- moderate is usually reckoned at around 350F -- is only to set the surface, two or three minutes; if it colours at all you have gone too far.
Mocha sugar, carmine, pink sugarNo. 3249's Mocha sugar is a coffee-flavoured sugar and No. 172 a pink-coloured sugar; neither recipe is reproduced here, so the grain and method are not something to state firmly. Carmine is cochineal, still sold as a food colour, though a modern red is the easier substitute. The mixture of coloured sugar, chopped almonds, chopped pistachios and currants is a decorative crust, not a filling.
Frolle paste and gum pastePate frolle (No. 136) is a sweet almond short paste, here rolled 3/8 inch thick as a base plinth and iced pink. The gum paste or English paste border is sugar-and-gum modelling paste: structural decoration, traditionally left on the plate rather than eaten.
Wells of LoveThe garnish, No. 3338, is small puff-pastry bouchees with jelly in the hollow, a translation of the French puits d'amour. The recipe does not say how many.
YieldThe recipe gives six-ounce pieces of paste but neither a count of them nor a number of servings. Assemble no more than a couple of hours before serving; jam softens the leaves quickly.

A Little History

Mille-feuille means "thousand leaves," a name for laminated puff pastry that predates any single pastry cook's claim to it, and the layered cake built from separately baked discs was standard grande cuisine practice long before Charles Ranhofer set it down. Ranhofer was chef at Delmonico's in New York for some thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is his attempt to record the whole restaurant repertoire in one numbered system, which is why this entry reads as a chain of references to other pages. It sits under "Large Cakes for Entremets" because an entremets in the nineteenth-century service was a sweet course brought out as a display piece: the frolle-paste plinth, the gum-paste border and the ring of jelly-filled bouchees exist so the thing can stand on a sideboard and be looked at before it is cut. The pistachios, currants and carmine-tinted coffee sugar reflect a period taste for coloured, contrasting garnish that later French pastry largely abandoned in favour of plain glazed tops.