[Sca-cooks] Napolean pastry

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Nov 5, 2005, at 12:59 PM, Nick Sasso wrote:

>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> On Nov 5, 2005, at 3:02 AM, Stefan li Rous wrote:
>>
>>> niccolo difrncesco commented:
>>>> Think in terms of a Napolean pastry with Pizzelles (wafres) and
>>>> Nuttella, maybe softened with some whipped cream.
>>>
>>> Uh, what's a "Napolean pastry"?
>>
>> You'll probably find them in your medium-fancy bakeries. Normally,
>> three layers of puff pastry and, sandwiched between, a thickish
>> vanilla pastry cream <<SNIP>>.
>> Adamantius
>
> The hoity toity, Bobby Flay crowd will also turn this into a sort  
> of modern
> art sculpture if you pay them enough for the plate.  The flavored  
> goo of
> choice is used as an anchor for one crisp 'plank' of something.   
> Then plop a
> glob of goo and place another crisp at a different angle/direction/ 
> plane of
> existance.  Repeat until you have a plated 'sculpture' that could  
> go in the
> Guggenheim.  These can be built sweet as with nuttella and  
> pizzelles or
> savory as in crackers with some sort of pipable farcemeat.
>
> niccolo difrancesco
> (cheese wiz and saltines is the 'hillbilly' version

Around here, it might be matzoh with lox cream cheese spread. Yes,  
they can get pretty varied, but in the US, if you go to a bakery and  
ask them for napoleons, you'll probably get puff pastry and creme  
patissiere. What's interesting, though, is that no matter how far the  
modern hoity-toity variants diverge from the original concept, the  
more they stay the same conceptually. The layers seem to be the  
without whom none, as the saying goes.

Adamantius




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la  
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them  
eat cake!"
     -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  
"Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
     -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry  
Holt, 07/29/04