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Crumpets
One cup of sugar, one-half cup of butter, one-half cup of milk, two cups of flour, a little vanilla, a teaspoon of baking powder. Spread with teaspoon on baking pan. When baked roll while hot into cornucopias or any shape desired.- Mrs Walter Snowdon Smith.
This is not a crumpet in the British sense but a thin rolled wafer cookie, closer to a krumkake or a French cigarette russe. The whole recipe hinges on rolling the cookies the instant they leave the oven.
- Roll them hotThey crisp within seconds of coming out of the pan. Bake four or five to a sheet, lift with a thin offset spatula, and roll each around the handle of a wooden spoon or a metal cone while pliable. Any that harden flat can be returned to the oven for 30 seconds to soften again.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A moderate-to-quick oven, 375°F, suits thin drop wafers; they need only 5 to 8 minutes and are done when the edges brown and the centres are still pale.
- Spread them thin"Spread with teaspoon" means exactly that: deposit a teaspoon of batter and smear it into a thin round about three inches across. Thick mounds will not roll. Leave generous space, as they spread further in the heat.
- Butter and creamingHalf a cup of butter is one stick, 4 oz. Cream it with the sugar until light before adding the milk and flour, or the batter will be too stiff to spread.
- Baking powderBaking powders of this period were generally single-acting. A level teaspoon of a modern double-acting powder is plenty; more will puff the wafers and spoil the roll.
- Pan surfaceThe recipe says only 'baking pan'; it would have been greased. A silicone mat or parchment gives cleaner release, but bake on the pale side of brown so the wafers stay flexible long enough to shape.
- Vanilla'A little' is about a teaspoon; taste the batter and judge.
- Yield and servingThe batter will make several dozen wafers, depending on how thin they are spread. Cornucopias were meant to be filled at the last minute with sweetened whipped cream or a fruit whip; filled early, they go limp. Store unfilled in an airtight tin.
The name is the giveaway that this is a domestic manuscript recipe rather than a professional one: a true crumpet is a yeast-raised griddle bread full of holes, and nothing here resembles it. What Mrs. Smith is describing belongs to the large family of thin rolled wafers — krumkake in Norwegian kitchens, cigarettes russes and tuiles in French ones, "cornucopias" in American receipt books — all of them needing a batter thin enough to bake crisp and a cook fast enough to shape it before it sets. Household names drifted freely, and community-contributed cookbooks preserved whatever a family happened to call a dish, attribution and all. The signed contribution was itself part of the appeal: readers sent in their party pieces, and a cornucopia piped with whipped cream was exactly the sort of thing brought out for afternoon callers.