The millefeuille rediscovered

One of my sad disappointments in recent years has been the decline of the millefeuille.  Sad creature that I am, I've always had a weakness for pâtisseries.  When I spent a year in Heidelberg in the sixties, on a very meagre wage, my weekly treat was a gooey cake - of the Black Forest Gâteau type - in one of the town's cafés, where I was surrounded by buxom ladies in Tyrolean hats tucking into whipped cream.  In later years, the existence of the Pâtisserie Bordelaise in Ribérac was sufficient inducement for me to buy my first holiday home nearby.

The millefeuille, with its delicious combination of puff pastry, crême patissière and sticky icing on top, is a staging-point fairly close to the terminus of heaven.  But I've noticed in recent years that the name has been degraded.  Having placed my order in any one of a variety of rather self-important eateries, I've been dismayed to receive two pieces of shortbread with strawberries and cream in the middle.  I have felt like bursting into the kitchen and asking whether education in maths has now declined to the point where people can't distinguish between deux/two and mille/a thousand.  But, being a middle-class English male I've just eaten the pathetic substitute for what I was expecting, in a state of seething resentment.

However, I'm happy to say that the millefeuille lives on.  The other evening we were in London and, after the theatre, had dinner at The Delaunay in the Aldwych.  I'd not been before, but was familiar with its sister-restaurant The Wolseley, in Piccadilly - a bustling grand brasserie with a Central European flavour to the food.  The Delaunay has taken the formula a stage further.  Inspired, its website says, by the grand café tradition of Europe, it serves food throughout the day.  Germanic leanings are shown by the use of the German word Konditorei for their pâtisserie section.

I'd wolfed a particularly delicious steak tartare - always a mistake late at night because of its particular indigestibility, but one can't always be sensible - and was quietly groaning and thinking of the taxi back to our lodgings when I noticed a millefeuille on the menu.  Fearing disappointment yet again, I quizzed the waiter, who gave me a rundown on the Delaunay version, which involved puff pastry, a lemon cream and some praline.  A masterpiece of the patissier's art arrived shortly after I had succumbed to temptation, and was placed reverently before me.  It was perfect in every way - the puff pastry with a slight biscuity texture, the lemon cream tangy, the praline giving it a slight crunch.  Heaven on a plate.

I am therefore delighted to report that rumours of the millefeuille's demise are largely exaggerated, and that in the opulent surroundings of The Delaunay it continues to thrive.

Antony Mair