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Wafer Biscuits, Almond
Blanch, peel, and pound till smooth four ounces of Jordan almonds. Mix with them two ounces of powdered and sifted sugar, and moisten the mixture with the white of an egg. Heat an untinned baking-sheet, and rub it over with pure white wax. Let it get cold, then place on it, four inches apart from each other, portions of the paste, the size of a penny-piece. Flatten these with a knife till they almost touch one another and are about the size of the top of a tumbler. Blanch and chop two ounces of almonds, and mix them with an ounce of sugar and a tea-spoonful of white of egg. Sprinkle this on the surface of the wafers, and bake in a gentle oven. When sufficiently baked, roll them whilst warm round a piece of wood, and leave them till crisp.
A thin almond tuile in all but name. The whole recipe turns on speed at the end: the wafers are pliable for perhaps thirty seconds out of the oven, and brittle after that.
- Jordan almondsThese are large, sweet Spanish almonds prized for their length and clean flavour, not the sugar-shelled confection sold under that name today. Plain blanched whole almonds are the right substitute.
- Pounding to a pasteFour ounces of blanched almonds ground in a food processor with the two ounces of sugar will behave better than nuts alone, which turn oily and clump. Pulse rather than run the machine.
- The white of an eggThe recipe names a single white but not how much of it to use. Add it a teaspoon at a time until the paste is spreadable but not slack; a whole large white may be more than four ounces of almonds will take.
- Untinned sheet and white wax'pure white wax' is bleached beeswax, rubbed over a bare iron sheet so the paste would release. Use baking parchment or a silicone mat on a heavy sheet and skip the wax entirely.
- SizesA Victorian penny is about an inch and a quarter across, and the top of a tumbler two and a half to three inches. Spread each blob thin with the back of a knife; the recipe sets them four inches apart and flattens them until they almost touch.
- A gentle ovenNo temperature is given; something in the region of 300-325F suits. The wafers should dry to pale gold at the centre with faintly browned edges, roughly 8-10 minutes. Any hotter and the almond topping risks scorching before the paste has set.
- RollingWork one sheet at a time. Lift each wafer while still hot and curl it round a wooden spoon handle or a dowel; if they harden flat, return the sheet to the oven for thirty seconds to soften them again.
- YieldPerhaps eighteen to twenty wafers, depending how thin they are spread. They keep several days in a tin but go leathery in humid air, so airtight storage matters.
Wafers of this kind sit at the point where the biscuit tin meets the confectioner's counter: almost no flour, held together by ground almond, sugar and egg white, and baked so thin that they must be shaped while hot. The approach is close to that behind the French tuile aux amandes, and it depended on a smooth iron plate -- hence the wax rub. Almonds imported from Spain and Italy were an expensive store-cupboard item in the nineteenth-century British kitchen, which is why a recipe of this sort appears among the finer sweet biscuits rather than the everyday ones, and why the book bothers to specify the grade of nut.