![]() ![]() There are several types of temperamental butter pastry in French tradition, pâte this and pâte that, but not much difference among them they all have roughly the same amount of butter-a lot. The butter, however, makes the pastry temperamental: work it too hard-knead it with flour as you might bread dough, roll it out as you might pasta-and the result will be glue. A proper French pastry has the flake and the flavors of butter, a surprising sweet tartness that goes with just about anything, especially fruit. American pies often include vegetable fat-i.e., hydrogenated shortening, like Crisco-which is reasonably easy to work with and doesn’t fail at warmer temperatures. The apples-they’re everything, obviously. (Me? Pretending to be a pastry chef? Ha!) The tarte aux pommes, I learned, has three components: the apples, which are sliced in beautiful uniformity homemade applesauce, the base that the apple slices are arranged on and a pastry half made of butter. Six months later, I did, when I went to a cooking school in Lyon and signed up for all the pastry classes, including a stage (something like an apprenticeship) in the school’s upmarket restaurant. It looked like, what, an expression of infinity? It was an over-the-top aesthetic act and an early lesson in French pastry-make it beautiful and you will make it scrumptious, because the eater’s sense of anticipation will insure that it is. ![]() The showcase tart, by virtue of its exceptional diameter (it put me in mind of a giant pizza for a tailgate party), had seven, and each ring of fruit was so exactingly carved and symmetrically placed that the cook could have used a ruler. A typical French tart consists of three concentric circles of fruit slices. The first tarte aux pommes that I came upon in Lyon, and on only our third day in the city, was inside the doorway of a bouchon and was so large that, having just been removed from the oven, it was put on its own dining table to cool. ![]()
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