EDNOTE. "How fully I fdelt nature glued to me   / And how my childish palate loved the taste / Half-fish, half-honey of that golden paste! / My picture book was at an early age. Can anyone recall the taste of mucilage?
 
This message was  originally submitted by as-brown@COMCAST.NET  to the NABOKV-L

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I believe the golden paste is simply the glue that was called mucilage that
used to be common in school rooms and used by kids at home through most of
this century and probably the last for pasting together their art junk.

It came in a bottle with a reddish rubber sort of a nipple that you rubbed
on whatever surface you were going to stick something to, say, a photo
snipped from Life magazine into a scrap book.

I would bet almost every kid who used this stuff tasted it at some time.