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Dessert

Pate D' Office, or Confectionery Paste

A stiff confectionery paste made from flour, sugar, and egg whites, baked into shapes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Pate D' Office, or Confectionery Paste

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the paste

  1. Sift the flour and sugar on a marble slab, creating a hollow in the center.

  2. Add the egg whites into the hollow and mix into a stiff paste.

  3. If the paste is too stiff, add more egg whites until the proper consistency is achieved.

  4. Knead the paste with your wrists until perfectly smooth.

  5. Roll the paste to a thickness of ¼ inch.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake on slightly buttered plates in a 350°F (175°C) oven.

  2. When half done, remove from the oven and cut into desired shapes.

  3. Return the cut pieces to the oven to finish baking.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fine flour
Provides the structure that holds the paste together and sets as it bakes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pieces brown as they bake.
Egg whites
Bind the flour and sugar into a paste and help the pieces set and rise in the oven.

The step that matters

Adding egg whites gradually. Too much egg white makes the paste soft and sticky, while too little leaves it crumbly. Adding them a little at a time lets you reach a stiff, smooth dough that holds its shape when rolled and cut.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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