One pastry. Three countries. Three names, and two of them are arguing.
There's a pastry you already know: crisp puff pastry, pastry cream, more pastry, more cream, powdered sugar or icing on top. In Korea it's 밀푀유. In Italy it's millefoglie. In an American bakery, it's a Napoleon.
Same dessert. And the three names disagree with each other in a way I find genuinely funny once you pull the thread.
The two names that agree
Mille-feuille is French for "a thousand leaves" — the layers. Millefoglie is Italian for exactly the same thing. Two languages, same image, same dessert. No argument there.
I met the Italian one first, years before I ever heard anyone say the French word out loud. So my instinct has always been that Italy has a real claim here, and it turns out that instinct isn't baseless — Neapolitan pastry cooks had been layering cream into flaky pastry for a long time. The dessert as a named, codified French thing shows up in French cookbooks by the mid-1600s, and by the early 1800s the great French pastry chef Carême was already describing it as an old recipe.
So: contested, genuinely, and older than the argument.
The name that doesn't agree with anything
Then there's "Napoleon," which is where it gets good.
The common assumption is that it's named after Napoleon Bonaparte. It almost certainly isn't. The name most likely comes from napolitain — French for "Neapolitan," meaning from Naples. In French, napolitain and Napoléon sound close enough that people conflated them, and the wrong one stuck.
Which means the American name for this dessert is a centuries-old mishearing. And it points at Italy.
That's the part I keep enjoying. Italy appears to have lost the naming fight entirely — everyone says the French word — except the American name was quietly saying "Neapolitan" the whole time and nobody noticed.
So why doesn't anyone in America say "mille-feuille"?
Here's my honest theory, and I'll flag clearly that this part is my read rather than documented fact.
Once both names existed side by side, one of them was much easier to say. There's a real, well-documented thing called menu anxiety — people avoiding ordering food they're not confident pronouncing. Quinoa is the classic example. Croissant is an ongoing low-grade pronunciation standoff between American and French speakers to this day.
"Mille-feuille" is not a word most English speakers will confidently say out loud to a stranger holding a pastry box. "Napoleon" is. I don't think that explains where the name came from — that was an accident. I think it explains why the accident won.
Two different questions, and they have two different answers.
One more thing, for the Korean readers
Worth adding, since it's the question I got asked: if Italy has the older claim, why does Korea use the French word?
Not because Korean bakers chose France over Italy. It's that essentially all professional pastry vocabulary worldwide is French — pâtissier, crème, the whole kitchen lexicon — because pastry professionalized and standardized in France. Anyone anywhere who learns pastry inherits French words along with the technique. There was never an Italian option on the table to reject.
Sumi | NYC + Hudson Valley | @miguktv on YouTube
New posts regularly — subscribe so you don't miss the next one.
Is there a food word you avoid saying out loud because you're not sure you've got it right? I'll go first: I still stall on "hors d'oeuvre," and I've never once been sure I had it right. Leave a comment.
Comments
Post a Comment