Lemon Wafers
2 eggs 2 cupfuls sugar 2 cupfuls Crisco 2 cupfuls milk 5 cents baker's ammonia 5 cents oil of lemon Flour to make stiff dough 2 teaspoonfuls salt Cover ammonia with milk and let soak over night. Next morning add sugar, Crisco, salt, eggs well beaten, lemon and enough flour to make a stiff dough. Roll very thin, cut in squares or diamonds, lay on Criscoed tins and bake from five to seven minutes in hot oven.
Sufficient for one hundred and eighty-six wafers.
A very large batch of thin, crisp rolled cookies leavened with baker's ammonia rather than baking powder. Two of the quantities are given in 1913 pennies rather than spoonfuls, so they need judgment.
- "5 cents" of baker's ammoniaBaker's ammonia (ammonium carbonate, also sold as hartshorn) was bought by the nickel's worth at the druggist, and the amount is genuinely unrecoverable — likely somewhere around an ounce. For a dough built on two cups of sugar and two of fat, 2 to 3 teaspoons of crushed baker's ammonia is a defensible starting point; more will taste harsh.
- "5 cents" of oil of lemonThis is lemon essential oil, not the extract on the modern baking shelf, and it is many times stronger. Start with 1/4 teaspoon of oil of lemon for the whole batch, or use 2 to 3 teaspoons of lemon extract instead.
- Roll them genuinely thinThis is the hinge. Ammonia leavening works by breaking down into gas that must escape during baking; in a thick cookie it stays trapped and the wafer tastes of ammonia. Roll to about 1/8 inch or less and keep the baking time short.
- The smell is expectedThe oven will smell strongly of ammonia while the wafers bake. It dissipates as they cool and is not a sign anything has gone wrong. Ventilate the kitchen.
- Oven temperature"Hot oven" in this period generally meant somewhere in the 400–450F range. At that heat five to seven minutes is right; pull them when the edges have just colored.
- Overnight soakCovering the crushed ammonia with the milk and leaving it overnight dissolves the crystals completely. Skipping this leaves gritty specks that blow out as bitter pockets. Cover the bowl and refrigerate it rather than leaving it on the counter.
- CriscoTwo cupfuls of Crisco means vegetable shortening, and any modern shortening works as written. Butter can be substituted by weight but spreads more, so the wafers will be less crisp and less square.
- YieldOne hundred and eighty-six wafers is not an exaggeration for this quantity of dough at that thickness. Halve or quarter the recipe unless you are baking for a crowd; the dough keeps a day or two wrapped and chilled.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to the wave of cookbooks Procter & Gamble published to teach American cooks what to do with Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening it introduced in 1911 — which is why recipe after recipe calls for it by name, down to the "Criscoed tins." The leavening, though, is older than the fat: baker's ammonia, long known as hartshorn because it was once distilled from deer antler, is the traditional lift for thin crisp cookies across northern Europe, from Scandinavian sirupsnipper to German springerle. It works best in wafers and snaps, where the dough is thin enough for the gas to escape, and it produces a shatter that baking powder cannot match. Buying it, and the oil of lemon, by the nickel's worth at the drugstore counter seems to have been common enough in the period, and it is a reminder that the household baker's supplier was often the pharmacist rather than the grocer.