No. 131

Cooked Paste for Fanciful Borders

Pate Cuite pour Bordures de Fantaisie

Boil one pint of water with a quarter of a pound of butter and a grain of salt; as soon as the liquid boils remove it from the fire, and incorporate in one pound of flour so as to obtain a good paste, then replace it on to a moderate fire and stir vigorously until it detaches from the bottom of the saucepan, then remove it entirely and pour it on to a floured table; as soon as it cools off slightly, knead it with the hands, adding to it slowly one pound more flour; by this time the paste should be perfectly smooth; after it has obtained a consistency, turn it the same as puff paste (No. 146), giving it seven or eight turns, having the paste remarkably smooth; it must be used at once.

← No. 130 Brioche Paste Elementary Methods No. 132 Cream Cake Paste →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a pâte morte — a stiff, essentially inedible construction dough for building the borders and platters on which cold dishes were displayed. It reads like choux paste at the start and then diverges sharply, so treat it as an entirely different animal.

The measurementsOne pint is 2 cups (16 fl oz) of water; a quarter pound of butter is one stick, 4 oz. The flour totals two pounds, roughly 7 cups by scoop-and-level — one pound cooked into the water, one pound worked in cold on the bench.
"A grain of salt"A pinch, nothing more. The paste is structural rather than seasoned.
"Moderate fire" is the stovetopNo oven is involved at this stage. Medium heat on a burner, stirring hard until the mass pulls cleanly from the pan bottom and leaves a film — the same test as for choux.
Why it is not chouxChoux paste uses roughly comparable weights of water and flour, plus eggs. Here the flour is doubled and there are no eggs at all, which is what kills the rise. The result is a dense paste stiff enough to hold a cut or carved edge.
The hinge: use it at onceRanhofer means this literally, though he does not explain why; the paste stiffens as it cools and, with no egg, will not be worked back. Cut and assemble while it is still warm and pliable.
"Turn it the same as puff paste"Seven or eight turns, but with no butter block and no lamination; the effect is to homogenize the cooked and uncooked flour into one smooth body, which is what the recipe repeatedly asks for.
Yield and useTwo pounds of flour makes a generous amount — enough to border several large platters. Finished pieces of this sort were meant to be looked at, not eaten.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's summary of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it belongs to a moment when a formal cold buffet was as much architecture as cookery. Borders, plinths and socles built from stiff pastes, rice flour, tallow or wax raised galantines and aspics off the platter and gave the carver's work a frame; the technique descends from the French grande cuisine of Carême, who is generally credited with turning the display piece into a discipline of its own. Ranhofer files this under Elementary Methods, presumably because a kitchen of that size wanted a cheap, reliable, workable paste on hand — flour, water and a little butter, cooked to a paste for strength and worked with more raw flour for stiffness. The genre faded over the following generation, as Escoffier's leaner service and later refrigerated display cases made the elaborate cold table look laborious rather than grand, and these recipes now survive largely as evidence of how much of a nineteenth-century banquet was never intended to be eaten.