Tompouce

The tompouce is a lesson in Dutch public manners disguised as pastry. Put one on a saucer at a birthday table and conversation pauses, just briefly, while everyone decides how to attack it. Fork through the top and the cream flees. Lift the lid and you look like a vandal. Turn it on its side and you may be the only honest person in the room.

But let me tell you a secret: the name already tells you this pastry has always been a small performance. Tom Pouce was the French stage name used for General Tom Thumb, the celebrated nineteenth-century little person performer Charles Stratton, whose tours made his name famous across Europe. The Dutch pastry borrowed the name for a neat little portion of French-style layered pastry, and then, with our usual talent for making imported grandeur practical, we squared it off, filled it with banketbakkersroom, pastry cream, and iced it pink.

The trick is not complication. Hou het altijd simpel. Bake the puff pastry flat and crisp, make a proper vanilla custard thick enough to stand between the layers, and glaze only the top sheet before you assemble. That last point matters. If you ice the pastry after filling, you'll press the cream sideways and learn humility in real time. History and cookery, they cannot be separated, especially when the evidence is on your shirt.