Vanilla Wafers

A plain rolled sugar cookie flavored with vanilla, written in the shorthand of a book that expected you to have read the ginger snap recipe a page or two earlier. That cross-reference carries the whole method: chill the dough, roll it very thin, cut into rounds, and bake.

• The missing methodThe recipe leans entirely on the Ginger Snaps recipe printed elsewhere in the book, which is not reproduced here. For a dough of this kind the usual handling is to chill it until firm, roll it thin on a lightly floured board and cut with a round cutter. Without chilling, this dough is soft to roll and will take up extra flour, which toughens the wafer.
• Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. Thin wafers colour fast; around 375F is a reasonable modern setting. Check at 6 minutes and expect 6 to 9 minutes total. They crisp as they cool, so pull them when the edges are just brown.
• Butter and lardOne-third cup of fat, half butter and half lard, is about 2 tablespoons and 2 teaspoons of each. Lard gives a shorter, crisper wafer; all butter works and tastes better, but the cookie will spread slightly more. Modern shelf-stable shortening behaves closer to the lard.
• Rolling thickness"Wafer" is the instruction. Roll to about 1/8 inch or thinner. Rolled at ordinary cookie thickness these come out as soft, cakey rounds rather than the snapping wafer intended.
• Baking powderTwo teaspoons to two cups of flour works out at about a teaspoon per cup, which is close to standard practice today rather than unusually generous. Reducing it to 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons will give a flatter, crisper result if that is what you want.
• VanillaTwo teaspoons is a lot for a batch this size. Extract strengths varied, so if you want to judge the flavour, do it by smell rather than by tasting the raw dough, which contains raw egg.
• YieldSeveral dozen 2-inch wafers, depending on how thin you roll. They keep well in a tin for a week.