[Sca-cooks] PUFF OR LEAF PASTRY

Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius adamantius1 at verizon.net
Sat Apr 12 21:29:14 PDT 2008


On Apr 12, 2008, at 11:37 PM, Suey wrote:
> I am confused. You have puff pastry after 1500. I have leaf pastry  
> until
> then at least . When and how did we make that change?
> Suey

We're all confused. Who is "you"?

One possibility is that early leafy pastries seem usually to be either  
cooked and/or assembled before they enter their stacked, leafy state.  
For example, something akin to phyllo dough or barq. The pastry is in  
one layer until you stack them up, AFAIK. They don't puff up nearly as  
dramatically as puff pastry. Puff pastry, a.k.a. mille-feuille, is  
already stacked in its thousands of layers prior to forming and  
baking: you roll out a rectangle of dough, place some butter on top,  
and wrap it into a sealed parcel of dough, then you roll it out thin,  
fold it into thirds or quarters, roll it out again to its original  
thickness, leaving you with something like four or five layers of  
dough and three or four layers of butter between them. You then fold  
and roll it again, for fifteen layers, and again, for 45 layers, and  
so on until you've got about 2000 layers (I did the math as  
represented in La Varenne's recipe a while back but I forget the exact  
number -- opens up little calculator program on Mac: 2917 layers after  
seven stages of folding and rolling?)

I don't recall seeing any description of this prior to [approximately]  
the early 17th century (Hugh Plat and Gervase Markham both provide  
recipes, I STR; somewhat later there are recipes from both Digby and  
La Varenne, as well as others).

What we've been talking of mostly is pate a choux, which is really  
more like a batter that puffs up when cooked, forming a hollow, crusty- 
on-the-outside pastry, which today is generally cut open and filled  
with something, but it appears that this was not originally a standard  
practice (in fact, I think there's a croquembouche recipe in some  
classic 19th-century cookbook -- I thought it was in Alexandre Dumas  
pére's Grand Dictionnaire du Cuisine, but I now can't find it -- that  
calls for little balls of baked pate a choux, cemented together into a  
pyramid shape with caramel glaze, but without the  pastry cream  
filling we moderns have come to expect in this dish). Or, maybe the  
unfilled version is intended for display purposes or something...

Adamantius






"Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people's souls,  
when we all ought to worry about our own souls, and other people's  
bellies."
			-- Rabbi Israel Salanter




More information about the Sca-cooks mailing list