"nappes plices" is probably the term you're looking for
from
http://theatlantic.com/unbound/corby/ck970114.htm:
"Apple-pie order
A proper chef always keeps her kitchen in apple-pie order: spoons and forks do not fraternize wildly in the cutlery drawer, lids do not wander from their containers, salt shakers do not plummet into the crevice between oven and wall. Such a compulsion for culinary organization is known as apple-pie order, an idiom that may have grown out of how apple pies, in the good old days, were made by carefully arranging apple slices in a highly stylized, vertical pattern (which was then hidden under a crust of dough). Alternatively, the apple pie part of the idiom may have originated as an English corruption of the French phrase nappes plices, meaning folded linen, or as an English corruption of the French phrase cap-a-pie, meaning head to foot (Shakespeare uses this idiom when he has Horatio describe Hamlet's ghostly father as armed cap-a-pie): both French phrases -- nappes plices and cap-a-pie -- are suggestive of minute attention to detail. Whatever its origin, apple-pie order was first recorded in English in the late eighteenth century."
