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
Sift the flour and sugar on a marble slab, creating a hollow in the center.
Add the egg whites into the hollow and mix into a stiff paste.
If the paste is too stiff, add more egg whites until the consistency is right.
Knead the paste with your wrists until it is perfectly smooth.
Roll the paste to a thickness of ¼ inch and cut it into the desired shapes for your dish.
Bake and finish
Bake the shapes on a lightly buttered baking sheet in a 350°F (175°C) oven.
When half done, remove them, cut them as desired, and return to the oven to finish baking.
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.
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Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together92,116 recipes
Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
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Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together106,462 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked 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
- All-purpose flour
- Provides the structure that holds the paste together and sets as it bakes.
- Sugar
- Adds sweetness and helps give the baked shapes a crisp, tender texture.
- Egg whites
- Bind the flour and sugar into a paste and help the shapes set and hold their form.
The step that matters
Kneading until perfectly smooth. Kneading develops the gluten in the flour and evenly distributes the egg whites. A paste that is not smooth can bake unevenly, crack, or hold pockets of dry flour.
“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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