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Wafers, Ice
Mix together half a pound of flour and half a pound of powdered sugar. Add three well-beaten eggs and a few drops of essence of vanilla, and beat the mixture till it is quite smooth. Melt half a pound of fresh butter, work this into the batter, and beat it again. Add very gradually a quart of milk. Let the batter remain untouched for an hour, and bake the wafers in the usual way.
A very thin, pourable batter for the crisp wafers served alongside ices — closer to a crêpe batter than a cookie dough. The Victorian instruction to "bake in the usual way" assumes a pair of hinged wafer irons heated over the fire, so that step needs translating.
- Weights to volumeHalf a pound of flour is about 1¾ cups; half a pound of powdered sugar is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons; half a pound of butter is two sticks (225 g). A quart of milk is 4 cups (about 950 ml).
- "Powdered sugar" in this bookIn late-Victorian English usage this means ordinary granulated sugar ground fine — closer to today's caster or superfine sugar than to modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Superfine is the right substitute.
- The batter is meant to be thinA quart of milk, plus melted butter and eggs, to less than two cups of flour gives a very loose pouring batter, thinner than heavy cream. That is deliberate: it is what lets the wafer spread paper-thin between hot irons. Do not thicken it.
- The hour's rest mattersThe hour's rest -- Standing lets the flour hydrate and the gluten relax, as with a crêpe batter, and the recipe is explicit that the batter should be left untouched for an hour. Refrigerate if the kitchen is warm, and stir gently before using.
- Melted butter, cooledWork the butter in warm but not hot, or it will begin to cook the beaten eggs. Add the milk gradually as directed — dumping it in at once will leave the butter in floating specks rather than emulsified through the batter.
- "The usual way" means an ironThe modern equivalent is a pizzelle or krumkake iron, preheated and lightly greased for the first wafer only. Roughly a tablespoon of batter per wafer, 30-60 seconds a side, until pale gold.
- Shaping while hotIf you want the rolled cornet or cone shape that these were served in with ice cream, roll each wafer around a wooden form the instant it leaves the iron. They set hard within about ten seconds and shatter if you are late.
- Yield and keepingThe full batch makes a great many wafers — upwards of four or five dozen from a standard pizzelle iron — so halve it unless you are catering. Store airtight the moment they are cold; they go soft quickly in a humid kitchen and can be re-crisped in a low oven.
Wafers baked between hinged iron plates are one of the oldest surviving European baked goods, made in monastery and guild kitchens long before domestic ovens were common, and the trade of the wafferer is recorded in medieval England. By the nineteenth century the wafer had settled into a specific role at the English table: a crisp accompaniment to ices and creams, which is why a recipe of this kind is filed under "Ice." The rolled version of the same batter, curled hot around a wooden cone, is often said to be the ancestor of the ice cream cone able nnicety to street food is usually traced to the early 1900s, well after this book.