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Peanut Wafers
1 pint chopped peanuts 3 eggs (well beaten) 1 cup white sugar 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons sweet milk Five Roses flour to stiffen.
Roll and cut in strips like lady fingers. 2 eggs
A thin, brittle nut cookie written in the shorthand of a milling-company cookbook, where the reader was assumed to know how a rolled dough should feel. Two details need settling before you start: how much flour, and what to do with the stray line at the end.
- The trailing "2 eggs"The recipe lists 3 eggs in the body and then "2 eggs" after the instructions. The reason for the discrepancy is not recoverable; it may be a printing slip or a stray fragment of an adjacent recipe. Use the 3 well-beaten eggs given in the ingredient list and ignore the stray line.
- Flour to stiffenWith three eggs and only two tablespoons of milk, expect somewhere between 1½ and 2 cups of all-purpose flour to reach a dough firm enough to roll. Add it in stages and stop as soon as the dough holds together and is no longer tacky; more flour than that gives a hard, dusty wafer rather than a crisp one.
- A pint of peanutsA pint is 2 cups by volume, which is roughly 10 oz of unsalted roasted peanuts, chopped fine. Chop them small: large pieces tear the dough when it is rolled thin. Modern salted cocktail peanuts will overwhelm the teaspoon of salt, so use unsalted and reduce the salt to ½ teaspoon if you cannot.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk. The term distinguished it from the buttermilk and sour milk used in recipes leavened with soda. Whole milk is the closest match.
- Oven heatNone is given. A moderate oven, about 350°F, suits a thin wafer of this kind. Thin wafers bake fast, so check at 8 minutes and expect 10 to 12 at most. They should be pale gold at the edges and will crisp as they cool.
- Rolling and cutting"Like lady fingers" suggests strips of roughly 3 inches long and ¾ to 1 inch wide. Roll to about ⅛ inch on a lightly floured board; a chilled dough handles far better than a freshly mixed one, so give it 30 minutes in the refrigerator.
- YieldRoughly four to five dozen strips, depending on how thin you roll. Store airtight; the peanut oil goes stale faster than a plain cookie, so they are best inside a week.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg to promote its Five Roses brand flour, and the book states that it was compiled from recipes contributed by users across Canada. Peanuts moved from a Southern field crop to a national grocery staple in North America across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and cookbooks of the 1910s show them turning up everywhere: in soups, loaves, candies and small cakes. The instruction to cut the dough "like lady fingers" is a period convenience, borrowing the familiar shape of the sponge biscuit to describe a size the author did not want to spell out in inches.