Skip to main content
Dessert

Pate D’ Office, or Confectionery Paste

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. 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 flour and sugar on a marble slab, making a hollow in the middle.

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

  3. If too stiff, add more egg whites until the right consistency.

  4. Knead the paste with your wrists until smooth.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll the paste to ¼ inch thick and cut into desired shapes.

  2. Bake on lightly buttered plates in a 350°F (175°C) oven.

  3. Halfway through baking, cut shapes to your liking and return 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 + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 baked paste turn crisp and lightly browned.
Egg whites
Bind the flour and sugar into a paste and help the shapes set firm when baked.

The step that matters

Adding egg whites gradually. Too much egg white makes the paste sticky and hard to shape, while too little leaves it crumbly. Adding it in small amounts lets you reach a stiff, workable consistency.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes