Sweet Wafers
Six eggs, one pint of flour, two ounces of melted butter, one and a half cupfuls of powdered sugar, one cupful of milk, one teaspoonful of nutmeg. Beat whites and yolks separately and very stiff. Rub the sugar and butter together, and work in first the yolks, then the milk, then the flour and whites. Bake in well-buttered wafer or waffle irons very quickly, browning as little as possible. Roll them while hot upon a smooth, round stick not larger than your little finger, slipping it out carefully when the wafer takes the right shape.
Crisp, rolled wafers baked in a patterned iron and curled while hot around a stick — the same family as the krumkake and the pizzelle.
- MeasuresA pint of flour is 2 cups; 2 oz melted butter is 4 tablespoons; the sugar is 1½ cups.
- Beat whites separatelyWhipping the whites stiff and folding them in gives the wafers their lightness — don’t skip it.
- The modern ironA pizzelle or krumkake iron is today’s “wafer iron”; bake quickly and keep them pale, as the recipe says, for the crispest result.
- Roll while hotWrap each soft wafer around a thin dowel or the handle of a wooden spoon the instant it comes off the iron; it sets in seconds and shatters if you wait.
- Work in batchesThey stiffen fast, so shape one before pouring the next — and keep the iron hot throughout.
Thin wafers pressed in hinged irons are among Europe’s oldest baked sweets, descended from the flat oublies and communion wafers of the Middle Ages. As sugar and spice reached ordinary kitchens, plain church wafers gave rise to festive ones: the Italian pizzelle, the Norwegian krumkake, the French gaufrette, all baked on decorated irons and often rolled into cones and cylinders while warm. Handed down through immigrant families, the rolled wafer arrived in America as a holiday specialty — a bit of edible lacework that turned a hot iron and a wooden stick into a delicate confection.
From page 67 of the 1904 edition.
Original page from the book
