Sift a pound of flour on the table, arrange it in a circle and in the center lay half an ounce of salt, four ounces of butter and a gill of water; mix thoroughly, working the flour in as fast as possible. When the paste begins to attain a body, knead it thoroughly twice, mold it round, form, and leave in a cool place.
This is one of Ranhofer's structural pastes, made for cutting into borders and bases that hold a cold platter together rather than for eating. Treat it as a building material with edible ingredients.
Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, and its "Elementary Methods" chapter is a catalogue of the building blocks a brigade needed before dinner could be plated. Pâtes à dresser belong to the garde-manger and the pastry office rather than to the dinner itself: stiff flour-and-fat doughs cut into scalloped borders, plinths and socles that raised a galantine or a cold salmon above the level of the dish and kept aspic and garnish neatly contained. Nineteenth-century grande cuisine judged a buffet largely on architecture, and the fashion, generally traced to Carême's elaborate cold work earlier in the century, produced a whole family of inedible or barely edible construction pastes alongside the edible ones. The heavy dose of salt here is practical: it firms the dough.