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Chocolate Wafers
1 cupful sugar 5 tablespoonfuls Crisco 2 cupfuls flour 1/4 cake chocolate 2 eggs 1/4 teaspoonful baking soda 1/2 teaspoonful vanilla extract 1/4 teaspoonful salt Cream Crisco and sugar together, add chocolate melted, eggs well beaten, vanilla extract, flour, salt, and soda. Mix and turn out on to floured baking board. Roll out thin, and cut with small cutter. Lay on Criscoed tin and bake from seven to ten minutes in moderate oven.
Sufficient for forty-six wafers.
A plain rolled chocolate cookie from a shortening manufacturer's promotional book. The dough carries no liquid beyond the eggs, so handling is the whole game.
- Moderate ovenRead that as 350F. Thin wafers at this size are done in seven to ten minutes and go bitter fast if pushed past that; pull them when the edges are set and the centres still look soft.
- "1/4 cake chocolate"Unsweetened baking chocolate was sold as a half-pound cake scored into eight one-ounce squares, which puts a quarter cake at 2 oz. Some brands sold smaller cakes, so the amount is genuinely ambiguous; 2 oz of unsweetened chocolate suits the sugar and flour here.
- CriscoStraight vegetable shortening, still on shelves, though the modern product has been reformulated more than once and is no longer the hydrogenated cottonseed oil of this book's day. Five tablespoonfuls is a scant third of a cup. Butter works but spreads more and browns faster, so watch the last two minutes.
- The sodaA quarter teaspoon is not there for lift. Unsweetened chocolate is mildly acidic, and the soda both neutralises that and raises the pH slightly, which darkens the colour and softens the crumb. Do not increase it or the wafers taste soapy.
- A stiff, dry doughTwo cups of flour against two eggs and a third cup of fat gives something closer to shortbread than cookie dough. Chill it for half an hour before rolling, and roll between sheets of parchment if it cracks.
- Roll thinAbout 1/8 inch. "Wafer" is meant literally, and the stated yield of forty-six depends on it; thicker rounds will be cakey and give you half as many.
- Criscoed tinA greased baking sheet. Parchment is easier and prevents the thin edges catching.
- Yield and keepingForty-six small wafers, roughly 1 1/2 to 2 inches across. They crisp as they cool and keep a week in a tin.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s and 1920s: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks how to use a new product. Crisco, a hydrogenated cottonseed oil shortening, was introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, and the accompanying recipe books, credited to Marion Harris Neil, called for it in place of butter, lard and suet in nearly everything, down to greasing the tin. That is why the instruction reads "Criscoed tin" rather than "greased."