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Wafers, Fruit, for Dessert
Take any kind of ripe, well-flavoured fruit. Put it into an earthen jar, cover closely, and set it in a pan of boiling water. Keep the water boiling quickly round it till the juice flows freely from the fruit. Strain it through a jelly-bag, and with each pint of filtered juice mix a pound of powdered white sugar and the white of an egg. Beat the mixture till it forms a stiff paste. Spread it in a thin layer upon buttered paper, and bake in a gentle oven till it is dry enough to leave the paper. Turn it upside down, and put it again in the oven until it is perfectly dry. Stamp it in shapes, and place these in layers between sheets of white paper in a tin box.
This is a Victorian dessert confection — steam-extracted fruit juice whipped with sugar and egg white, then dried to a crisp wafer. It is closer to a meringue than to modern fruit leather, and the whole thing hinges on drying rather than baking.
- "A gentle oven"A slack or cool oven; the book gives no figure. In a modern oven the lowest setting, somewhere in the region of 200-250F, is the usual working equivalent. Anything hotter risks colouring the sugar and puffing the wafer instead of drying it. Propping the door slightly ajar with a wooden spoon lets moisture escape.
- The jar in boiling waterThis is steam extraction: an earthenware jar, covered, set in a pan of water kept at a fast boil (the recipe is explicit about this) so the fruit collapses and gives up juice without scorching or diluting. A heatproof bowl over a saucepan, or a covered bowl in a low oven, does much the same. Expect an hour or more for firm fruit such as plums or currants.
- Jelly-bagA double layer of damp muslin or a fine sieve lined with cheesecloth. Let it drip and resist squeezing — pressed juice comes through cloudy and the wafers lose their translucency.
- The ratioOne pint of juice to one pound of sugar and one egg white. Note that the pint here is the imperial 20 fl oz, not the US 16. That is an enormous quantity of sugar by weight, and it is structural: it is what makes the paste stiff enough to spread and hard enough to stamp.
- BeatingBy hand this was a long job. In a stand mixer reckon on something in the order of ten to fifteen minutes to bring the mixture from a slack froth to a thick, matte, pipeable paste that holds a ridge. Underbeaten mixture spreads out flat and never dries evenly.
- Buttered paperUse baking parchment or a silicone mat, unbuttered. Spread no more than about 1/8 inch thick; thicker layers stay tacky in the middle however long they sit.
- Drying timeThe original gives none. Reckon on 2-3 hours before the sheet will lift, then another hour or two upside down. It is done when a corner snaps rather than bends.
- Stamping and storageThe recipe stamps the shapes once the wafers are perfectly dry; if they shatter at that stage, cutting while the sheet is still slightly warm and pliable is the practical remedy. They are strongly hygroscopic -- layer between parchment in a genuinely airtight tin, and expect them to soften quickly in a humid kitchen.
- YieldThe original gives none. At the thickness suggested above, a pint of juice with its pound of sugar will cover a good deal of sheet area; the number of wafers depends entirely on the size of the stamp.
Fruit wafers belong to the dessert course as the nineteenth century understood it — the final service of fruit, nuts, sweetmeats and small dry confections set out after the cloth was drawn. They sit in a long English tradition of preserved fruit pastes and "leaches" that runs back to the Tudor banqueting course, where sugar was the luxury on display and the fruit largely a vehicle for it. The steam-extraction method here is simply the standard jelly-maker's technique of the period, borrowed at the point where the juice would otherwise have gone into a jelly bag for preserves; the addition of whipped egg white lightens the paste into something crisp and pale rather than dense and translucent. Cassell's was compiled as an alphabetical dictionary for households with a cook and a reliable range, and gives such recipes without timings.