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Almond Gauffres
Mix a table-spoonful of fine flour with a little sugar, the rind of a lemon chopped small, and two eggs. When thoroughly mixed, add to them four ounces of blanched and finely-sliced sweet almonds. Make a baking-tin quite hot, and oil it well. Spread the mixture on it very thin, and bake it in a moderate oven until slightly coloured. Take it out and stamp it in rounds, and fold each over a reed in the shape of a small horn. This must be done while they are hot, and great care must be taken not to break them. Fill them with a little bright-coloured jam, and put them in a hot place to dry. Probable cost, 1s.
This is a tuile batter under an older name: almost no flour, a great deal of almond, and a shaping window of about twenty seconds. Everything depends on working while the sheet is still hot.
- The hinge: shape them hotOff the oven the wafers are pliable for perhaps 20-30 seconds, then they set brittle. Bake a small batch at a time, and if a tray stiffens before you have finished, return it to the oven for 30 seconds to soften again.
- "Moderate oven"Around 350F/175C. "Slightly coloured" means pale gold at the edges with the centre still blond; the sugar and the almonds' oil colour fast, and over-baked almonds turn bitter.
- The proportions are not a misprintOne tablespoon of flour to two eggs and 4 oz almonds gives a loose, almond-heavy mixture rather than a conventional batter. Spread it as thin as you can with an offset palette knife or the back of a spoon; anything thicker will not roll.
- A reedA length of cane about the thickness of a finger. A wooden dowel, a cannoli tube or the handle of a wooden spoon does the same job. Oil it lightly or the wafer will weld to it.
- The tinA hot, well-oiled tin was the usual option in the 1870s and it is the weak point of the method. A baking sheet lined with a silicone mat or parchment releases more reliably, and the wafers still lift while warm.
- Sweet almondsOrdinary blanched almonds. The distinction from bitter almonds mattered when both were sold; bitter almonds are not sold for eating now, and nothing in this recipe requires them. "Finely-sliced" means flaked almonds, not ground.
- Lemon rindZest only, no white pith, and take it off with a fine grater rather than chopping — visible shreds interfere with rolling a thin wafer.
- Stamping the roundsCut the rounds as soon as the sheet leaves the oven, and roll immediately.
- Filling and yieldThe quantity makes perhaps a couple of dozen small horns, depending on how thin you spread it. Jam softens the wafer within an hour or two, so the "hot place to dry" is doing real work; even so, fill as close to serving as you can manage. Store the empty horns airtight.
- Probable cost1s is one shilling, a Victorian price for the whole batch and of no use as a modern guide.
Gauffre (now usually spelled gaufre) is the French word for a wafer or waffle, and is generally traced to a Frankish root with the sense of honeycomb -- the word also means honeycomb in French, and the connection is usually explained by the cell pattern of the irons. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the 1870s the English kitchen had borrowed the name for two quite different things: batters cooked between hinged irons, and thin baked almond wafers of the sort described here, closer to what a French pastry cook would call a tuile or, once rolled, a cornet. Rolling a hot wafer round a cane and filling it with jam or cream is a long-established confectioner's trick.