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Cake Confectionery and Little Sweets: Wafers
PEANUT WAFERS Beat together one-half cupful of nice white lard mixed with butter (half and half of each) and one cupful of sugar, add one cupful of ground peanuts, and one and one-half cupfuls of flour mixed together with one teaspoonful of baking-powder, and one-third teaspoonful of salt. Add one-half cupful of milk or water, or just enough to make a dough that will roll thinly. It is best to mix the flour and milk in alternately. Cut into small rounds and place a half peanut meat on top of each cake.
GERMAN WAFERS Warm one-third cupful of butter, and stir in five eggs, one at a time. Mix in one quart of sifted flour, and one teaspoonful each of vanilla and banana extract. Spread over a buttered dripping pan and bake in a hot oven until a delicate brown. Cut into squares, pick with a fork and dip into powdered sugar.
JAPANESE WAFERS Beat up the whites of two eggs until stiff, then add two tablespoonfuls of rice flour and two tablespoonfuls of sugar. Work in one tablespoonful of softened butter. Pour into a pan lined with paraffine or oiled paper, making it as thin as possible. Bake in a moderate oven and roll around a round stick, after cutting them in four inch squares.
Three thin cookies grouped under the old confectioner's sense of "wafer" — anything rolled or spread paper-thin and baked crisp. The peanut and German doughs behave predictably; the Japanese one is a tuile and needs to be handled hot.
- Oven temperatures"Hot" for the German wafers is usually taken as roughly 400-450F, and on a shallow pan that is only a few minutes. "Moderate" for the Japanese wafers is around 350-375F; watch for the edges browning while the centre is still pale.
- A quart of flourDry measure by volume: a quart of sifted flour is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb. With five eggs and a third of a cup of butter and no other liquid, that gives a very stiff paste — closer to a rolled dough than a batter. Expect to hold back some of the flour rather than force it all in.
- Ground peanutsThis means peanuts ground to a coarse meal, not peanut butter. Pulse roasted unsalted peanuts in a food processor until sandy; stop before they turn to paste or the dough will slump and the wafers will spread.
- Lard and butterThe half-and-half mix was probably a matter of economy as much as the short, crumbly texture lard gives. Modern leaf lard works as written; all butter is fine but the wafers will brown more.
- Paraffine paperParaffin-coated paper was the period's non-stick lining. Use parchment. Do not use modern wax paper at oven temperature.
- Rolling the Japanese wafersThe hinge of that recipe: the squares must be cut and rolled around the stick while still hot and pliable. Once cool they shatter. Slide the pan back into the oven for a few seconds if the sheet stiffens before you get to it.
- Banana extractPeriod banana flavouring was typically based on isoamyl acetate, the ester also sold as pear essence. Modern imitation banana extract is much the same thing and can be used at the same rate, though a teaspoon in a quart of flour is assertive by modern taste.
- YieldNone is given. The peanut dough makes roughly three to four dozen small rounds; the German pan of dough cut into squares gives about the same; the Japanese batter, spread as thin as it demands, yields eight to ten four-inch squares.
The word wafer covers a great deal of ground in turn-of-the-century confectionery books: originally a batter baked between two hinged irons, by 1900 it had loosened to mean any very thin sweet biscuit, whether irons were involved or not. All three here are pan-baked. The naming may owe more to a fashion of the period than to provenance, though that is hard to establish. The peanut wafers are the most American of the three: ground peanuts were cheap, widely available after the crop's spread through the South, and appear across household cookery of the era in everything from soups to candies. The mixture is creamed with both lard and butter.