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OAT-MEAL WAFERS
Use equal parts water and oat-meal, make as thin as you can shake it out on the bottom of pan, so that when done it will not be thicker than a knife-blade anywhere, and in most places you can see daylight through it. Bake very slowly until quite dry, watching that it may not scorch. In taking out it will probably break into many fragments, but they will be delicious ones-not shapely for the table, but so temptingly savored that any delicate person who can eat at all will find them satisfying, nourishing, and easily digested-far better than the standard sick dish called gruel. As for the well folks, put your wafers out of the way if you expect to find any of them for the invalid's next meal. ssard
A two-ingredient oat cracker from the invalid-cookery chapter, and one of the shortest useful recipes in the book. Everything depends on how thin you spread it and how low you bake it.
- The hinge: thinnessThe batter must go on no thicker than a knife blade, translucent in places. Anything thicker steams rather than dries and comes out leathery instead of crisp. Tilt and shake the pan rather than spreading with a spatula, which drags the oats into ridges.
- What "oat-meal" meantIn 1877 this generally meant ground or cut oats — pinhead/steel-cut or a coarse oat flour — rather than the rolled flakes sold today, which were only beginning to be marketed. Rolled oats will not shake out thin; pulse them to a coarse meal first, or use half oat flour to loosen the batter.
- Equal parts by whatThe original does not say weight or volume. Equal parts by volume gives a stiff paste with modern meal; add water until the mixture pours and self-levels, which is the real test.
- "Bake very slowly"The recipe gives no temperature; a low modern oven, in the region of 275–300F, matches the intent. The goal is dehydration, not colour. Reckon on something like 40 minutes to an hour depending on thickness, and check often near the end — the edges go from pale to scorched quickly.
- Pan and releaseThe recipe specifies nothing but a 'pan'; in an 1877 kitchen that would have been bare iron or tin. Parchment saves the sheet from a cemented-on layer and makes it far easier to lift the wafer out whole before breaking it.
- SaltNone is called for, in keeping with plain sick-room fare. A pinch or two in the water improves them considerably if the eater is not on a restricted diet.
- Yield and keepingA cup of meal with a cup of water, thinned enough to pour, will cover something in the region of a half-sheet pan and give a large handful of shards. Cool completely before storing airtight; residual moisture will soften them, and a few minutes back in a low oven revives them.
Buckeye Cookery (1877) devotes a section to "Food For The Sick," and its quarrel here is with gruel — thin boiled oatmeal porridge, a standard nourishment for invalids in Anglo-American households and frequently complained of by those made to eat it. These wafers make the argument that the same meal and water, dried rather than boiled, becomes something a person with no appetite will actually finish. Oats carried a reputation for being easy on a weak stomach, an idea often traced to Scottish practice and much repeated in nineteenth-century domestic medicine. The closing joke about hiding them from the well members of the household is in the book's own voice, and the stray "ssard" at the end appears to be a scanning artefact of the printed page rather than part of the recipe.