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Rosette Wafers
¼ teaspoon sugar 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup milk 1 cup Five Roses flour (more or less).
Beat the eggs slightly with sugar and salt; add milk and flour, and beat until smooth.
This is a thin pour batter for a rosette iron — a decorative cast-iron form on a long handle that is heated in deep fat, dipped in batter, and returned to the fat so the shell fries loose. A few points on handling it.
- Batter consistencyThe flour is given as "more or less" because the cook is expected to judge the batter by eye; rosette batters are usually taken to about the thickness of heavy cream, since a very thin batter will not cling to the iron and a thick one gives a heavy wafer that is harder to release.
- Rest the batterThe recipe calls for beating only until smooth and gives no standing time; some cooks let such a batter stand a short while before frying so the flour hydrates and the beaten-in air subsides.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe gives no frying instruction here; deep fat for wafers of this kind is generally taken to around 365-375F, cooler fat being absorbed into the wafer and hotter fat colouring it before it crisps.
- Heating the ironThe hinge of the whole thing: the iron must be heated in the fat before dipping, and the batter must come only to just below the iron's top edge. If batter runs over the rim, the wafer locks on and will not release.
- Do not grease the ironA greased or freshly washed iron sheds the batter entirely. A well-seasoned rosette iron is left dry and simply reheated between wafers.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; a batter of this size will make several dozen wafers depending on the size of the iron. Drain on paper, dust with icing sugar while warm, and serve the same day, as they soften quickly in humid air.
Rosette irons are often said to have come to North American kitchens with Scandinavian settlers, among whom the fried batter shells are known as struvor or rosettbakkels and belong to Christmas baking; batter fried on a dipped iron form also turns up outside Europe, in Persian and Indian sweets made on comparable forms. The batter is essentially a crepe or popover mixture -- egg, milk, flour, a little sugar and salt -- and its appearance in a Canadian flour-company cookbook suggests the technique was familiar enough to general household baking by the early twentieth century. Books like this one existed to sell flour, and a recipe turning one cup of it into a large number of showy wafers suited the publisher as well as the cook.