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Wafers (Cups whole wheat flour)
2 cups whole wheat flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons butter Milk Mix and sift the dry ingredients; cut and rub in the butter. Make a stiff dough with milk. Take bits of dough double the size of an English walnut and roll them the size of an eight inch plate. Bake in quick oven till lightly browned.
A plain unleavened wheat wafer, closer to a Scandinavian flatbread or a cracker than to anything sweet. The recipe gives no oven number and no quantity of milk, so both are on the cook.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no number; "quick oven" in this period is generally taken as somewhere around 400-450F. Bake on the middle rack until lightly browned, roughly 5-8 minutes; thin wafers colour fast, so watch them.
- The milk is unmeasuredExpect somewhere around 1/2 to 2/3 cup for 2 cups of flour, added a spoonful at a time. The dough should be stiff enough to roll paper-thin without tearing, and drier than a biscuit dough.
- Roll it thinner than feels rightThis is the hinge. A ball of dough the size of two walnuts rolled out to an eight-inch round is very thin indeed, and thinness is what makes the wafer crisp rather than leathery. Roll directly on a floured baking sheet or on parchment to avoid tearing it in transit.
- Whole wheat flour has changedWhole wheat flour varies -- modern commercial whole wheat can be coarser and thirstier than the flour these books assumed. Let the mixed dough rest 10-15 minutes so the bran hydrates, or it will fight you at the rolling pin.
- ButterTwo tablespoons for 2 cups of flour is a lean short dough. Rub it in until the flour looks like damp sand; unsalted butter is fine, the recipe already carries its own salt.
- Baking surfaceNo greasing is needed. A dark or thin sheet will scorch the centre before the edges dry, so use a heavy pan and rotate it once.
- Yield and keepingRoughly a dozen large wafers, depending how generously you read "double the size of an English walnut." Break them into shards once cool and store airtight; they soften within a day in humid weather and can be re-crisped in a low oven.
Wafers of this kind were a staple of the American health-food and "digestive" baking that grew out of the Graham movement of the mid-nineteenth century, which promoted coarse unsifted wheat over white flour. By the era of the promotional cook book, whole wheat flour was a distinct commercial product with its own recipe pages, and thin unleavened wafers were one way to show it off: no yeast, no baking powder, nothing to disguise the flavour of the bran. Recipes like this one also filled a practical need, since such wafers served as the plain accompaniment to soup, cheese and invalid diets.