Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Paste for Borders
Paste for Borders
Put into a bowl the yolks of six or eight eggs, a few drops of water and a little salt, and mix in flour till it is so stiff that it can hardly be worked. Beat and work it till quite smooth, and keep it moist until required; roll it out quite thin, cut it in the desired shapes, and then place them on the dish before they get too dry. Brush over with the white of egg.
This is not a dish but a tool: a stiff egg-yolk dough for cutting decorative borders, croutons and fancies to edge a platter of cold food. It behaves like fresh pasta dough taken to its dry extreme, and the whole trick is in the stiffness.
- The hinge: stiffnessThe dough must be worked to the point where it barely moves under the heel of the hand. A soft paste slumps when cut and the points of the shapes go round. Add flour until it resists, then knead it smooth anyway, which takes real effort.
- QuantitiesEight yolks are roughly 5 oz/150 g of liquid. Expect them to take something like 2 to 2 1/2 cups (250 to 300 g) of flour, though the original gives no figure because the endpoint is a texture, not a weight.
- "A few drops of water"Literally that. Yolks alone will hydrate the flour; the water is there only to keep the mass from cracking as you knead. Too much and you lose the crispness that makes cut edges hold.
- Keeping it moistWrap in plastic or a damp cloth and rest at least 30 minutes before rolling. Resting relaxes the gluten built up in the hard kneading and makes thin rolling possible; unrested, the sheet will spring back and thicken.
- Rolling and cuttingRoll to about 1/16 in (1.5 mm). A pasta machine to its second-thinnest setting does this far better than a pin. Cut with aspic cutters or a sharp knife, work in small batches, and keep the rest of the dough covered.
- "Place them on the dish"The cut shapes were set straight onto a cold platter or a socle and brushed with egg white, which sets as it dries and gives the gloss, and would also help hold them in place. Do this while the cut pieces are still supple, as the recipe says; dry shapes crack and refuse to sit flat.
- Eating itYou can, but it is essentially a very hard noodle. This is decorative work in the older sense, made to be looked at and pushed aside.
This looks to be pâte d'office, the "office paste" of the professional cold kitchen, sometimes called dead paste because it contains no leavening and is not meant to rise or, often, to be eaten. Nineteenth-century service demanded that cold dishes arrive architecturally finished: hams and galantines set on socles, aspics ringed with cut shapes, the platter edged in a repeating pattern of crescents, diamonds and fleurons. Carême's generation raised this into a discipline and Escoffier's kitchens still practised it, and Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, was working in a hotel where a buffet was expected to look like a display as much as a meal. The recipe's presence here is a reminder that a good part of a grand hotel's labour went into things the guest admired and never tasted.