Egg Pastry
To one egg slightly beaten, add a pinch of salt, a tablespoonful of melted butter and flour sufficient to make a soft dough. Knead in the flour with the finger tips until the dough is smooth and very elastic and can be kneaded without flour and without sticking to the molding board. When properly made, egg paste can be rolled as thin as a sheet of paper.
This is an egg paste in the old sense — flour, egg and a little fat, no water and no leavening. It is the same dough a modern cook would call fresh pasta, and the whole recipe hinges on working in as much flour as the egg will absorb and no more.
- Flour quantityThe original gives none, which is honest: it depends on the size of the egg and the flour. Expect roughly 3/4 cup (about 100 g) of all-purpose flour per large egg. Add it in stages and stop while the dough is still slightly tacky, since it will stiffen as it rests.
- The hinge: knead past the sticky stageThe instruction to knead "without flour and without sticking" is the test that matters. Sustained kneading, on the order of ten minutes, develops enough gluten that the dough stops grabbing the board on its own; if you keep dusting with flour instead, you end up with a dry paste that cracks rather than stretching.
- Rest before rollingThe recipe omits it, but this dough will not roll paper-thin straight after kneading. Wrap it and let it sit 30 minutes at room temperature so the gluten relaxes.
- "Molding board"Simply the pastry board or work surface. A wooden board is the traditional surface and grips the dough more than stone or steel.
- Melted butterA tablespoon per egg enriches the dough and makes it easier to work. Salted butter is fine; drop the pinch of salt if you use it.
- What to do with itOne egg's worth rolls out to a sheet a foot or more across, depending how thin you take it — enough for noodles for two, a lining for small timbale cases, or a batch of filled dumplings. It is not a shortcrust and will not make a flaky pie shell.
- CookingCut thin and dropped into boiling salted water or broth, sheets this thin need two to three minutes, not the ten or fifteen minutes older noodle directions often call for.
"Egg pastry" or "egg paste" appears in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American cookbooks as a general-purpose stiff dough rather than a dish in itself: cooks cut it into noodles for soup, lined small molds and timbale cases with it, wrapped forcemeat in it, or used it for the little filled dumplings that turn up under names like kreplach and ravioli. The name itself reflects the period's use of "paste" for any rolled dough — puff paste, short paste, egg paste — a vocabulary inherited from English and French cookery writing, where pâte covers all of them. The boast that it can be rolled "as thin as a sheet of paper" is often said to have been a measure of a well-kneaded egg dough, and it survives in the modern pasta-maker's test of being able to read newsprint through the sheet.