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GAUFFRES (an easy way to make)
Clarify a quarter of a pound of fresh butter, and mix it with a pound of sifted loaf sugar, one pound of best flour, eight eggs well beaten, two table-spoonfuls of brandy, a tiny pinch of salt, a stick of pounded vanilla, and one or two grates of nutmeg. Drop the mixture on well-buttered baking-tins, in rounds the size of the top of a wine-glass, and, as soon as they are baked, curl them round a reed. Let them dry in a cool oven or before the fire, and shake a little sifted sugar over them before serving. A little good jam may be spread lightly on them, or they may be filled with whipped cream. Time, a few minutes to bake. Probable cost, 2s. 4d., exclusive of the brandy. Sufficient, a few may be put round a mould of jelly or blanc-mange.
These are thin drop wafers rolled into cigar shapes, closer to a brandy snap or the Italian cannolo shell than to anything cooked in a waffle iron. Almost everything about the recipe hangs on how fast you work once they leave the oven.
- The hinge: curl them hotThe wafers stay pliable for perhaps twenty seconds out of the oven and then snap. Bake six or eight to a tray at most, and keep the tray near the rolling form so each round can be lifted and wrapped the moment it firms enough to move. If a batch sets flat, thirty seconds back in the oven softens them again.
- "A reed"Any smooth cylinder about half an inch across: the handle of a wooden spoon, a metal cannoli tube, a chopstick. Butter or oil it lightly for the first few, and slide the wafer off as soon as it holds its shape.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold in hard cones, to be broken and pounded at home. Use caster or ordinary granulated sugar; the recipe's "sifted" only means it was crushed and passed through a sieve to get rid of lumps.
- The vanilla stickA pod, pounded in a mortar with a little of the sugar to break it down. A tablespoon of that vanilla sugar, or a teaspoon of extract, gives the same effect without gritty flecks of pod skin.
- Oven heatWafers of this kind want a fairly brisk oven. The book gives no temperature, but something in the region of 400F suits, so they set and colour at the edges before the butter has time to spread the batter into lace. "A few minutes" probably means three to five; watch for a pale gold rim while the centre is still blond.
- Drying them offThe second, cooler baking crisps the rolled shells. A 200-225F oven for ten to fifteen minutes does it, or leave them in the oven's residual warmth with the door ajar.
- Tins and butteringCassell's assumes a well-buttered tin; baking parchment or a silicone mat is more reliable, since a heavily buttered sheet encourages the batter to run and stick at the edges.
- Yield, and scaling downA pound of flour, a pound of sugar and eight eggs make a very large batch -- several dozen small wafers at least. Quarter the recipe for a household batch.
- FillingFill with jam or whipped cream only at the last moment, since moisture softens the shells. The book itself suggests them as a garnish set round a turned-out jelly or blancmange.
Gaufre is simply the French word for waffle, and the name carries the honeycomb pattern of the hinged irons in which the batter was traditionally pressed over a fire — the same root that gives English "goffered" for crimped or fluted linen. In the "easy way" of Cassell's title, the batter is dropped on a flat tin instead, baked, and rolled while warm, which turns a waffle into what an English kitchen would more likely have called a wafer or a rolled biscuit. The recipe belongs to a whole family of late-Victorian thin-baked sweets — brandy snaps, cornets, tuiles. The costing in shillings and pence, given here as 2s. 4d., is a standing feature of Cassell's and reflects a period when a cookbook was expected to help a housekeeper budget as much as cook.