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One of my favorite desserts is the Milfoya,

or Thousand Sheets in French.

It's a delicate pile of layers of puff pastry filled with vanilla pastry cream and top

with chocolate and vanilla icing.

One of the earliest, maybe the earliest, recipes for this delicacy can be found in the 1651

cookbook La cuisineier-Franceois, which also included other staple French recipes,

like ones for roux and bachamel.

But there have been layered pastries like it, known since the Roman Empire,

specifically coming from Naples.

And because of this historical tie with the region,

this style of pastry was sometimes called Napoleon.

Toss in years and years of confusion and conflation,

and you get a new name for an old pastry, which we still use today, the Napoleon.

So no, the layer dessert that I often demand on my birthday has nothing to do with a great French

emperor. If you want to know more about him, we suggest the Age of Napoleon podcast.

And to give you a taste of Napoleon and not a taste of A Napoleon,

here's an episode from that podcast that details the Battle of Austerlitz,

probably the greatest victory of Napoleon's entire career,

one he had to win, or face an end to his empire, and likely his life.

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