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Gateaux, Polonaise
Roll out on a lightly floured table a pound of feuilletage to thickness of quarter of an inch and cut six even pieces two and a half inches square. Lightly baste with a little water (on top only), fold the four corners to meet in the centre, arrange them on a lightly wetted pastry sheet, lightly egg the surface, sprinkle a little granulated sugar over and set to bake in a brisk oven twenty-five minutes. Remove, then fill the four open lines with currant jelly so as to form a cross, dress on a dish with a folded napkin, and serve.
A simple puff-pastry turnover shape — four corners folded to the centre, baked, then the open seams filled with jelly. Most of the work is in handling the pastry cold.
- FeuilletageFrench puff pastry, made with a full pound of dough here. A 400–500 g block of all-butter commercial puff is a fair substitute; rough puff made at home also works.
- "Baste with a little water"This means brush, not spoon over. A damp brush on the top surface only helps the folded corners stick to one another as they bake.
- Brisk ovenA hot oven; in modern terms somewhere around 425F, though the book gives no figure. Puff pastry needs high heat so the water in the butter layers turns to steam before the fat melts out. The recipe's twenty-five minutes suits squares of this size.
- Wetted pastry sheetDamping the baking sheet was standard practice to stop puff sliding and to add a little steam. Parchment on a heavy sheet does the same job with less mess.
- Egg washBrush the tops only and keep it off the cut edges — egg glues the laminated layers shut and the pastry will not rise where it runs down the sides.
- The hinge: keep everything coldCut the squares with a sharp knife or wheel in one stroke, fold, and chill the tray for 20 minutes before baking. Warm, dragged pastry will not lift, and the folded corners will unfurl.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly is the likely reading, and a common pastry finish. Add it after baking, while the pastry is still warm, so it settles into the four seams; warming the jelly briefly makes it easier to pipe.
- Yield and servingSix pastries, one per person as a dessert or tea cake. The folded napkin is the conventional presentation for such pastries; resting them on a wire rack before plating will keep the bottoms from softening.
"À la polonaise" is one of the loosest labels in the French kitchen repertoire — it attaches to garnished cauliflower, to a meringue-covered brioche gâteau, and, as here, to a jelly-filled puff pastry, with little in common between them beyond a vaguely Polish association. The connection is generally traced to the Polish court influence at Versailles in the eighteenth century, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented, and by the time this book was compiled the term had become a menu convention more than a claim about origin. The recipe itself is straight professional pastry-kitchen work: a pound of feuilletage, a standard fold, a red currant finish, and service on a folded napkin — technical shorthand rather than a domestic instruction. Its appearance in an "international" collection reflects the period's habit of cataloguing dishes by nationality even when the nationality was largely decorative.