The mille-feuille is one of France's most famous pastries. With its distinctive look, it is showing up in more and more cafés. Let's get to know this dessert a little better.
What Is a Mille-Feuille?
A mille-feuille is a pastry made from puff pastry rolled into sheets and baked until thin and crisp, then stacked in alternating layers with whipped cream or jam. It is finished with an elegant pattern of icing sugar and lines of chocolate.
Most mille-feuilles have three layers of pastry separated by two layers of cream. The filling can be sweet, such as cream cheese or custard, or tangy, such as lemon cream, strawberry cream or berry cream. It may also be decorated with fruit such as strawberries, blueberries or raspberries.
The Origins of the Mille-Feuille
There is no clear evidence of exactly when the mille-feuille began, but it was first mentioned in France in the 1600s, when a recipe for it appeared in one of the earliest French cookbooks, Le Cuisinier françois, written by François Pierre de la Varenne.
A century later, Marie-Antoine Carême, a renowned chef to the French elite and a pioneer of French haute cuisine, refined the mille-feuille and gave it the poetic name "gâteau de mille feuilles", meaning "cake of a thousand leaves" or "thousand-sheet cake".
Later, in 1867, Adolphe Seugnot, a celebrated 19th-century pastry chef, offered the mille-feuille as his signature speciality. As a result, Seugnot is sometimes credited with creating the mille-feuille, even though written records of it existed much earlier.
The Mille-Feuille Today
Originally, the filling layers of a mille-feuille contained only cream. Later, in the 18th century, it was served with jam instead of cream. Today, cream is far more popular than jam for the filling, and colour and flavour are often added with strawberries, blueberries or raspberries.
