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Chocolate Wafers
2 ounces chocolate 1 cup brown sugar 1 cup white sugar (granulated or powdered) 1 cup butter 1 egg (beaten) 2 cups Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon vanilla.
Grate the chocolate and set the cup into hot (not boiling) water to melt. Mix together the brown sugar and the white and rub in the butter. When creamy, add the beaten egg and then the melted chocolate, stirring briskly. Finally, add the flour and bake in quick oven.
A stiff, rich icebox-style dough with no leavening and no salt, written for a cook who already knew what a wafer looked like. The method leaves out the shaping step entirely, which is the one thing worth settling before you start.
- Shaping is the missing stepNothing in the text says how thin to make them, but "wafer" means thin and crisp. Chill the dough until firm, then roll it about 1/8 inch thick and cut rounds, or form logs, chill, and slice thin. Thick rounds from this dough bake into soft cookies, not wafers.
- "Quick oven"In period usage roughly 400-450F. At the very thin thickness intended it works, but the sugar-heavy dough scorches fast; 375-400F for 8-10 minutes gives more margin, and the wafers crisp as they cool.
- The chocolateTwo ounces of unsweetened baking chocolate, sold then in blocks that had to be grated. Chopping it is faster than grating, and a cup set in hot water is a serviceable bain-marie. Keep the water off the boil, as the instruction says, so the chocolate does not seize or grain.
- "Powdered" sugarIn a Canadian book of this period this generally means a fine granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Use granulated for both, or all granulated if you prefer.
- Butter and saltOne cup is 8 ounces, 225 g. No salt is called for; household butter was often salted. With unsalted butter add about 1/4 teaspoon, or the chocolate tastes flat.
- The vanillaIt appears in the ingredient list and never again in the method. Stir it in with the beaten egg, before the chocolate.
- No leaveningThere is no soda or baking powder. Do not add any; the result is a dense, snappy wafer rather than a risen cookie.
- YieldDepends entirely on how thin you roll them; expect well over four dozen wafers at 2 inches across. They keep well in a tin and firm up further on the second day.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg to sell Five Roses flour, and it became one of the most widely distributed cookbooks in Canada, a fixture in prairie and Maritime kitchens alike. Recipes like this one were contributed largely by ordinary housewives, which may go some way toward explaining the compressed, assumed-knowledge style: shaping and baking time are left out, presumably because the writer expected the reader to have made wafers before. The recipe also marks a moment in chocolate's domestic history. Block unsweetened chocolate still had to be grated by hand, and the trick of setting the cup in hot water rather than over direct heat is often said to have been common advice in period cookbooks, since chocolate scorches at a temperature well below what a stove top delivers. A "wafer" in this section means a thin crisp biscuit, closer to the modern chocolate snap than to anything soft and chewy.