Mix one pound of flour, three-quarters of a pound of butter, four or five egg-yolks, one grain of salt, and one gill of water. Form a paste, reserving a little of the water. Knead it well, then add slowly the rest of the water, roll it out, and set it aside to rest under a cover.
A rich, short pastry for lining timbale moulds — sturdy enough to hold its shape when unmoulded, but Ranhofer gives quantities and almost nothing else. The hinge is water control: hold back part of the gill, because flour absorbency and egg size decide how much you actually need.
Charles Ranhofer placed this in the "Elementary Methods" section of The Epicurean (1894), among the basic pastes a professional kitchen was expected to know, like a stock or a roux: the paste itself is unremarkable, and everything interesting happens in what goes inside it. A timbale takes its name from the drum-shaped metal cup; the word is generally traced through French and Spanish to the Arabic term for a drum, and by the nineteenth century it meant both the mould and anything cooked in it, from macaroni and truffles to salpicons of sweetbreads. Ranhofer cooked at Delmonico's in New York for some three decades, and his book reads as a working brigade's reference rather than a domestic cookbook.