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Anise Seed Wafers
1/3 cup Cottolene. 3 teaspoons anise seed. 1 cup granulated sugar. 3 eggs. 2 cups fleur. 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg. 1/2 teaspoon salt.
Flour.
PROCESS: Cream Cottolene, add sugar gradually, add egg yolks, one at a time, beating constantly. Beat whites of eggs stiff, add to first mixture alternately with flour mixed and sifted with anise seed, nutmeg and salt. Add just enough extra flour to dough to roll very thin. Shape with small, fluted cutter, and bake in a quick oven.
A thin, crisp anise cookie from a promotional cookbook, written when "quick oven" and a brand-name shortening needed no explanation. Two substitutions and a temperature are all it takes to bring it forward.
- CottoleneA cottonseed-oil-and-beef-suet shortening sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company, and the reason this book exists. Use 1/3 cup of any solid vegetable shortening, or the same volume of butter for better flavour, though butter will spread slightly more.
- "Fleur"A typesetting error for flour. The recipe calls for 2 cups in the main mixture plus an unmeasured additional quantity worked in at the end: add it a spoonful at a time, only until the dough will roll very thin.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-425F by modern equivalents; the book gives no temperatures. For wafers rolled very thin the window is narrow: about 5 to 7 minutes, and they go from pale gold at the edges to burnt quickly. Bake one test tray first.
- Roll very thinThis is the hinge. The dough should go to about 1/8 inch or less; any thicker and you get a soft cookie rather than a wafer, and the anise flavour reads as muddy instead of clean.
- Anise seedWhole seed, not ground anise and certainly not star anise. Crushing the seed lightly in a mortar before sifting it with the dry ingredients releases more flavour.
- Handling the doughThe stiff-beaten whites make a slack, sticky dough that is far easier to roll after an hour in the refrigerator. Roll between sheets of parchment and re-chill the scraps rather than adding still more flour.
- YieldThe recipe specifies only a "small, fluted cutter"; with one of about 1 1/2 inches you should get roughly five to six dozen. They keep well for a week or more in a tin.
52 Sunday Dinners was compiled by Elizabeth O. Hiller and published in 1913 by the N. K. Fairbank Company of Chicago, makers of Cottolene; the shortening appears throughout the book, which is the point of the whole enterprise. Cottonseed oil was an industrial by-product that food manufacturers spent the late nineteenth century persuading American cooks to accept in place of lard, and cookbooks given away free were among the chief means of persuasion. The wafer itself is older than the shortening: thin, crisp anise-flavoured biscuits are a fixture of German and Alsatian Christmas baking, related to the moulded Springerle and the simpler Anisplätzchen, and such baking travelled to the American Midwest with German settlers. Hiller's book is organised as a year of Sunday menus rather than by course.