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Chocolate Walnut Wafers
1/2 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, 2 eggs, 2 squares Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 1 cup chopped English Walnut meats, 1/4 teaspoon vanilla, 1/8 teaspoon salt, 2/3 cup bread flour.
Cream butter, and add sugar gradually, while beating constantly; then add eggs, well beaten, chocolate (which has been melted over hot water) nut meats, vanilla, salt and flour. Drop from tip of spoon, on a buttered tin sheet and bake in a moderate oven fifteen minutes.
A flourless-adjacent drop cookie in all but name: two-thirds of a cup of flour holds together a full cup of sugar, two eggs and a cup of nuts. The batter is loose and the wafers spread thin and crisp at the edges.
- The chocolateA "square" of Walter Baker's Premium No. 1 is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate. Use 2 oz unsweetened; the recipe's sugar is calculated against chocolate with none in it, and semisweet will make the wafers cloying.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; a moderate oven is usually taken as around 350F. Thin wafers may be done before the stated fifteen minutes, so start checking early: pull them when the surface looks dry and cracked but the centers still give.
- Bread flourThe stronger flour of the period's cooking-school kitchens, and the one such books call for as a matter of course. Modern all-purpose is a reasonable substitute here.
- Buttered tin sheetParchment or a silicone mat is easier. A sugar-heavy batter like this welds itself to bare metal as it cools, and buttering encourages further spread.
- SpacingThe batter runs. Drop teaspoon-sized mounds at least two inches apart, and bake one sheet at a time in the middle of the oven.
- VanillaA quarter teaspoon is scant by current taste; a half to a full teaspoon suits most modern palates.
- Walnuts"English walnut" simply distinguishes the common walnut from the American black walnut, which is stronger and more bitter. Ordinary supermarket walnuts are what is wanted; toast them briefly if you like.
- YieldAbout 30 to 36 small wafers. They crisp as they cool — let them set on the sheet a minute before moving, or they will tear.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, traced its chocolate mills back to the 1760s and by 1900 was among the most widely recognized chocolate names in the United States. Choice Recipes was one of a long series of small promotional booklets the company issued, collecting recipes credited to prominent cooking-school figures of the day — Fannie Merritt Farmer, Maria Parloa and Janet McKenzie Hill among them — with recipes typically specifying Baker's chocolate by name and grade. "Premium No. 1" was the plain unsweetened cake, the company's staple product, and the booklets are generally understood as an effort to persuade home cooks that it belonged in cakes and cookies rather than only in a cup of drinking chocolate. The wafer itself is characteristic of Boston cooking-school work of the period: precise small measures, creamed butter, and a batter built to spread thin on the sheet.