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Gateaux Religieuses
Peel, cut in halves, core and slice six sound apples; place in a saucepan with three ounces sugar, half vanilla bean and one ounce good butter; stir well with a wooden spoon, cover the pan and slowly cook for thirty minutes, occasionally stirring. Remove from the fire, briskly press through a sieve into a bowl and cool off. Place and keep the vanilla in sugar. Roll out a pound puff paste (feuilletage) on a lightly floured table to the thickness of a half dollar. Cut out twelve pieces three inches square. Lightly wet the surface of six with beaten eggs; evenly divide the apple preparation on top, in the middle; neatly smooth the surface, cover each with the other six pieces and lightly press the top paste down against the edges of the first. Lightly egg the surface of each, lay on a roasting tin and dredge two tablespoons granulated sugar over. Set in the oven to bake for twenty minutes. Remove, dress on a dish and serve.
A six-portion apple pastry built on nothing more than puff paste and a dry apple purée, so the whole thing hinges on how dry that purée is and how well the two squares are sealed.
- Get the filling dry and coldThe apples are cooked covered for thirty minutes, sieved, then cooled — all of that matters. Warm or loose purée steams the base square and the bottom will never puff or crisp, so spread it only when it is cold and stiff enough to hold a mound.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as the book assumes a baker's judgment. Puff paste wants a hot oven: 400–425F for the twenty minutes stated, on the middle rack. Below about 375F the layers leak butter instead of lifting.
- "Thickness of a half dollar"A scant 1/8 inch, roughly 2-3 mm. Rolled that thin, a pound of paste gives the twelve 3-inch squares the recipe calls for with trimmings to spare.
- Puff paste (feuilletage)One pound is about 450 g, which in practice is one or two sheets of commercial all-butter puff pastry depending on the brand. Check the thickness against the scant 1/8 inch wanted here, roll only enough to even the sheets out, and keep everything cold.
- Egg wash disciplineThe wash on the lower squares is glue, the wash on top is colour. Keep both off the cut edges — egg running down the sides seals the laminated layers together and the pastry rises unevenly.
- Sealing and ventingPress the top square down against the edges rather than crimping with a fork, as the original intends, then chill the assembled squares 15–20 minutes before baking. A small slit in each top lets steam out and keeps the seams from blowing open.
- Sugar dredgeTwo tablespoons of granulated sugar over six pastries gives a thin caramelised crust, not a glaze. It will colour fast in the last five minutes; move the tin down a rack if it darkens before the pastry is cooked through.
- The vanilla beanHalf a bean flavours the apples; the instruction to "place and keep the vanilla in sugar" means rinse, dry and bury the used pod in the sugar jar for later use. Half a teaspoon of extract stirred in off the heat is the substitute.
- YieldSix pastries, about 3 inches square, best eaten the day they are baked while the base is still crisp.
The name is the puzzle here. In standard French pastry a religieuse is a choux construction a small bun stacked on a larger one, glazed and piped, generally said to be named for the black-and-white habit of a nun and it has nothing to do with apples or puff paste. What Alexander Filippini gives in The International Cook Book (1906) is essentially a square chausson aux pommes, the apple turnover of French bakery trade, under a borrowed title. What is authentic is the method: a dry sieved apple marmelade sealed between two sheets of feuilletage, sugar dredged over rather than an icing applied, and the thrifty habit of returning the spent vanilla bean to the sugar jar.