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Wafers (Cup butter cups sugar cup)
1/2 cup butter 2 cups sugar 1 cup sweet milk 3 eggs 3 heaping teaspoons baking powder Nutmeg to taste Gold Medal flour to shape stiff Mrs. J. A. Noyes.
A contributor's shorthand, of the kind that assumes the reader already knows what a rolled wafer looks like. Everything hinges on how thin you get the dough.
- Roll it paper-thinThese are rolled cookies, not batter wafers. The dough should go out to about 1/8 inch or less; anything thicker bakes into an ordinary sugar cookie rather than the crisp, snapping wafer intended.
- "Flour to shape stiff"With this much liquid, expect somewhere in the range of 5 to 6 cups of all-purpose flour, added until the dough is firm enough to roll without sticking. The original gives no figure and none can be supplied honestly, so add it gradually and stop as soon as the dough holds together and leaves the bowl clean.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured milk. It is specified because many recipes of the period called for sour milk or buttermilk, which needed soda instead of baking powder. Whole milk here.
- Baking powderThree heaping teaspoons is a great deal by current standards. Level teaspoons are the sensible reading.
- SugarTwo cups to half a cup of butter is a lean, sugary dough, which is exactly what makes the wafer crisp rather than short. Granulated sugar.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction. Thin wafers want a hot oven, in the region of 400 to 425F, and bake in 5 to 7 minutes; they go from pale to scorched in under a minute at the edges, so watch the first tray and time the rest by it.
- NutmegFreshly grated if possible; the pre-ground jar is much flatter. A quarter to a half teaspoon for the full batch is in keeping.
- Chill before rollingThe dough handles far better after an hour in the refrigerator, and rolling a quarter of it at a time on a lightly floured board keeps it from softening as you work.
- YieldA large batch by modern standards, roughly six to eight dozen small wafers depending on your cutter. Half the recipe scales without trouble.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book belongs to a genre of promotional cookery published by millers, in this case the Washburn-Crosby Company of Minneapolis, whose Gold Medal brand later gave its name to General Mills' flagship flour. Books like it drew on recipes sent in by home cooks, which is why so many entries carry a contributor's name and so few carry usable instructions. The word wafer itself is much older than this dough, going back to thin batters pressed between long-handled irons over a fire, and by the late nineteenth century it had loosened to mean almost any very thin, crisp baked good. Nutmeg as the sole flavouring is characteristic of the period, when it was among the spices most reliably available in an American kitchen.