The Origins of Puff Pastry

First of all, thank you very much to everyone for checking out my blog and joining! I hope you will continue to enjoy my pastry history tidbits and pictures. As most of you who know me understand that I am technologically challenged, my goal by doing this blog is to also become more familiar with computers. Until I do though I have to give special thanks to my staff member Anthony Beller who has patiently been helping me. He also suggested the subject of this next blog, Puff Pastry.

Pate Feuilletee, or puff pastry is attributed to being first created around 1645 by Claudius Gele. Claudius an apprentice in a rural French patisserie, who in an effort to create a bread for his ailing father as prescribed by a doctor whom wanted the elder Gele on a diet rich in flour and butter, invented puff pastry by folding in layers of butter into an already butter rich dough. Claudius brought his creation first to Paris at the Rosabau Patisserie and then to Florence at the Mosca Pastry Shop where it became famous.

As I discussed in my first blog, we cannot look at history in a vacuum. Claudius' invention is a reflection of the times, the Baroque Era. 1645 France and Italy were royally connected. Henry IV, the first Bourbon King of France and Navarre was married to Marie de Medici of Tuscany. Their son Louis XIII ascended the throne in 1610 and with the aid of Cardinal Richelieu laid the foundation of a unified monarchy so when his son ascended the throne in 1643, France enjoyed one of its greatest eras under the Sun King, Louis XIV. Meanwhile in Italy the House of Medici had been the ruling family in Florence, Tuscany, Urbino, Rovere and Montefeltro since the fourteenth century. As great patrons of the arts, they are responsible for commissioning Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli to create many of their masterpieces.

Bernini created his infamous sculpture, St. Theresa in Ecstasy in 1645 and juxtaposed the themes of religion and eroticism for the Cornaro Chapel in Rome. Also in 1645 Marie de Medici commissioned one of the greatest representations of Baroque art in a series of paintings by Peter Paul Rubens illustrating the themes of exultation of the Catholic Church, monarchy, grandeur, opulence and excess. And so too had Claudius, a child of the Baroque era and an artist in his own right, reproduced these themes in his creation; homage to his father akin to the homage for God the Father Almighty the Catholic Church, excess in the use of copious amounts of butter, opulence in the richness of the butter and grandeur in the beautifully layered dough which can achieve such heights.

Throughout the centuries puff pastry has remained in the repertoire of chefs and today we enjoy it in many forms. I currently use puff pastry in several items at The Water Club, our Golden Delicious Apple Tart which is brushed with a Muscat de Beaumes de Venise nappage, Palmiers and Cinnamon Sticks (pictured below).









I hope you enjoyed the article and photos. The photo below shows the height puff pastry can attain when it is baked with the butter cold and set (on the left), the middle piece was baked with the dough at room temperature which illustrates the loss of height due to the butter not being cold thus not releasing enough steam to create air rising between the layers puffing it and giving the proper height, and the last representation is of a piece of puff pastry that has been docked (scored with the tool above the rectangle of puff pastry to pierce holes in the dough) before baking to prevent the excessive height. You would choose this method of docking if you were going to create a tart with fresh fruit as opposed to a tart that is baked with the topping.