Home › The Principles of Cookery › GENEVA WAFERS (a pretty dish for a juvenile party)
GENEVA WAFERS (a pretty dish for a juvenile party)
Rub a quarter of a pound of fresh butter to a cream, and mix with it, very smoothly, a quarter of a pound of flour, and three eggs, thoroughly whisked. Add three drops of the essence of vanilla, and three table-spoonfuls of pounded sugar. Beat with a wooden spoon until the ingredients are thoroughly mixed, then drop a dessert-spoonful at a time on a well-buttered baking-sheet, and put the wafers in a moderate oven. When sufficiently baked, take them out of the oven, twist them very carefully, or they will break, to the shape of small cornucopiae, and put them in the oven a minute or two longer to get crisp. Half fill them with jam, and put a little whipped cream on the jam. The cream put in half of them might be slightly coloured with cochineal. Time, a quarter of an hour, or less, to bake. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for a good-sized dish.
A tuile batter in all but name, and it behaves like one: the wafers are pliable for only a few seconds out of the oven, so shaping is the whole job.
- Shape them hot, two or three at a timeThe wafers set brittle within seconds of leaving the oven. Bake in small batches and roll each one around a cone form or the greased handle of a wooden spoon the moment it can be lifted; if a wafer stiffens, return the sheet to the oven for a few seconds to soften it again.
- WeightsA quarter of a pound is 4 oz (115 g) each of butter and flour. Three tablespoons of sugar is about 1½ oz (40 g).
- Pounded sugarSugar crushed fine in a mortar, the equivalent of today's caster or superfine sugar. Granulated will work but gives a slightly coarser, more speckled wafer.
- OvenA moderate oven is usually taken as about 350-375F (175-190C). At that heat thin wafers will colour at the edges in something like 6 to 8 minutes; the recipe's own "a quarter of an hour, or less" suggests the quarter-hour is an outside limit, and anything approaching it is likely to make them too dark to bend.
- Dessert-spoonfulTwo teaspoons of batter, dropped well apart. The batter spreads considerably, so allow four to a standard sheet and use parchment as well as butter.
- CochinealThe pink colouring is carmine, extracted from the cochineal insect, and it is still sold as a food colour. Any modern red or pink colouring does the same work.
- Fill at the last momentJam softens the wafers and whipped cream collapses them faster still. Fill only as the dish goes to the table.
- YieldPerhaps 20 to 24 cornucopiae from this quantity, depending on how generously they are dropped; the recipe says only that it is "sufficient for a good-sized dish".
Wafers of this kind descend from the medieval wafer, baked between long-handled iron plates and sold at fairs and church doors across Europe; by the nineteenth century, alongside the irons that remained in use, wafers were also simply dropped on a baking-sheet, baked flat and curled by hand. "Geneva wafers" under that name appear in a run of English cookery books through the Victorian period, Cassell's among them, though what connects the recipe to Geneva is not documented and the title may be no more than the general Victorian habit of attaching a continental city to a fancy sweet. The cornucopia shape filled with jam and whipped cream places it firmly in the era's dessert repertoire, where visual effect mattered as much as flavour, and the note that half the cream might be tinted with cochineal is entirely of a piece with a period that liked its party dishes in two colours.