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Wafers, Flemish
Rub a large lump of sugar upon the rind of half a fresh lemon till the yellow part is taken off, then crush it to powder. Put four ounces of flour into a bowl, mix with it a pinch of salt and the flavoured sugar, and add gradually a quarter of a pint of lukewarm milk and a table-spoonful of fresh yeast. Work the mixture to a soft dough, cover it, and put it on the hearth to rise. Work in a quarter of a pound of fresh butter beaten to cream, the yolks of three eggs well beaten, and, lastly, the well-whisked whites of the eggs. Let the dough rise till it is double its original size. Bake the wafers in the usual way. Put them while hot upon a dish, and sift powdered white sugar thickly over them. Time to cook the wafers, three or four minutes.
This is a yeast-raised waffle batter of the Belgian type, stiff enough to be called a dough and lightened at the end with whipped whites. Everything hangs on giving it two proper rises before it meets the iron.
- Sugar rubbed on lemonRubbing a lump of loaf sugar over the zest until it turns yellow is the old way of extracting citrus oil. Roughly a tablespoon of granulated sugar worked with the finely grated zest of half a lemon gives much the same result.
- Quantities in modern termsFour ounces of flour is about 115 g (a scant cup); a quarter of a pint, in a British book of this date, is 5 fl oz or roughly 2/3 cup; a quarter pound of butter is 115 g. The batter should be thick and slack rather than pourable.
- Fresh yeastA tablespoon of fresh compressed yeast is about 15 g. Substitute roughly 1 1/2 teaspoons of instant dried yeast, stirred into the flour, or 2 teaspoons of active dry proofed in the lukewarm milk.
- Lukewarm means lukewarmMilk at blood heat, around 100F, wakes the yeast; much above 120F begins to weaken it, and it is killed well short of simmering. The hearth stands in for a warm draught-free spot at 75-80F, where the first rise may take about an hour.
- The second rise is the pointButter, yolks and whipped whites all knock the air out. Letting the enriched dough double again is what gives Flemish wafers their open, spongy crumb rather than the dense crispness of a plain batter wafer. Do not skip it; allow another 45 minutes to an hour.
- "Bake in the usual way"This assumed a long-handled wafer iron heated in the fire. A modern electric waffle iron on a medium-high setting, well greased for the first round, does the job in the three or four minutes stated. Shallower plates are closer to the original wafer iron, though deeper ones will also take this batter.
- Sugar while hotThe dusting of powdered sugar is meant to hit the wafer straight off the iron so it partly melts into the surface. Waffles held warm and sugared later just look dusty.
- YieldRoughly four to six wafers, depending on the iron. The batter does not keep well once fully risen; bake it out in one session.
Wafers of this kind belong to a long Low Countries tradition of iron-baked cakes, from the medieval gaufre pressed between hinged plates over an open fire to the yeast-raised Brussels and Liege waffles sold at fairs and markets in the nineteenth century. The lattice-patterned iron was itself an old piece of kit — church wafer irons and secular ones with heraldic or honeycomb faces survive from the late Middle Ages, and the honeycomb pattern is generally credited with giving the gaufre its name. Cassell's, compiling a household dictionary for a British middle-class readership in the later Victorian decades, gathered continental sweets like this alongside plain English baking, and the recipe's assumption that a cook owns a wafer iron and knows how to work it says something about how common that tool still was. The enrichment with creamed butter and separated eggs, and the finishing snow of powdered sugar, mark it as a tea-table or dessert item rather than street food.