No. 142

Noodle Paste, Noodle Paste for Borders and Repere Paste for Fastening

Pate a Nouilles, Pate a Nouilles pour Bordures et a Repere pour Coller

Noodle Paste.—Make a ring on the table with a pound of sifted flour, in the center lay a pinch of salt, a tablespoonful of tepid water and five beaten eggs; mix the eggs in slowly with the flour and then wrap the paste in a cloth, leave it to rest for fifteen minutes and afterward knead it well to have it smooth; this requires some time to do.

Noodle Paste for Borders.—The same preparation as for the above, the only difference being that the five whole eggs are replaced by ten yolks. This paste can also be used for covering dish bottoms.

Paste for Fastening on Borders (Repere).—This is simply sifted flour diluted with beaten egg and passed through a fine wire sieve to obtain a sufficiently liquid paste that can be pushed through a cornet. It should be consistent enough not to run.

← No. 141 Milan Paste Elementary Methods No. 143 Office Paste →

For the Modern Kitchen

Three related flour-and-egg pastes from Ranhofer's toolkit: one to eat, one to shape into decorative borders, and one that is essentially edible cement. The first is a straightforward rich egg noodle dough; the third was never meant to be tasted.

Quantities in modern termsA pound of sifted flour is roughly 4 cups; five beaten eggs plus one tablespoon of tepid water gives a stiff, barely tacky dough of about 1 1/2 lb. Egg-size standards have changed since 1894, so hold back part of the last egg and add it only if the flour will not come together.
The hinge: this dough is meant to be dryEgg-noodle paste should feel almost too firm to knead. Resist adding water; the long kneading Ranhofer calls for is what smooths it, not extra liquid. If it fights the rolling pin, rest it again rather than wetting it.
Rest, then knead, then rest againThe fifteen-minute rest before kneading lets the flour hydrate so the gluten will develop. Modern practice adds a second rest of 30 minutes after kneading, wrapped, which makes rolling thin far easier.
The flour ringThe ring of flour on the table is simply a well to hold the eggs while they are drawn in with the fingers. A bowl or a food processor does the same work; the dough is stiff enough that a stand mixer with the dough hook will handle it in five or six minutes.
Cooking fresh noodlesRanhofer gives no boiling time here; the paste is used in other recipes elsewhere in the book. Cut thin and dropped into well-salted boiling water, they need two to three minutes, not the ten or fifteen a dried pasta wants.
Border paste and its purposeThe ten-yolk version is a decorating paste, not a dinner dough. Yolks make it pliable and rich enough to be cut, molded, or pressed into a mold to line a dish bottom, where it holds a shape without shrinking. Ten yolks to a pound of flour needs care: work it in gradually, as yolk volume varies.
Repere is glue, not foodRepere was used to fasten borders to a platter or socle; the recipe treats it purely as a fastening paste, thin enough to push through a cornet but stiff enough not to run. Treat it as an assembly material rather than something to serve.
CornetA cornet is a cone rolled from parchment or stiff paper, used for fine piping alongside the pastry bag. Any small piping bag with a plain tip does the job; the paste should hold a raised line without slumping.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's account of some three decades running the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York, and its "Elementary Methods" chapter reads like a workshop inventory rather than a cookbook: stocks, forcemeats, and a run of pastes numbered one after another for use elsewhere in the book. Nouilles is generally traced to the German Nudel, and egg noodles are often said to have reached French cooking by way of Alsace, where they remain a standard garnish for braised meats and game. That a single entry covers noodles for eating, a yolk-rich paste for molded borders, and a flour-and-egg cement for sticking those borders to a platter says a good deal about nineteenth-century grand cuisine, where a dish's architecture, the socles and bordures that raised food into a centerpiece, mattered nearly as much as its flavor. Much of that scaffolding was structural rather than appetizing, and it vanished from restaurant practice as service moved from the platter to the plate.