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Ginger Wafers
Stir half a cup of butter to a cream.
Add gradually one cup of pulverized sugar and one tablespoon of ginger. Add half a cup of cold water and two cups of sifted flour. Spread thin on a baking sheet and bake in a cool oven. Cut into squares, triangles or cubes with a sharp knife and remove from the baking sheet by slipping a limber knife under them. The baking sheet should be well greased and quite cold when the dough is spread on it.-Emma P. Ewing.
A short, eggless, unleavened batter baked as one thin sheet and cut into pieces while still hot. The cutting is the whole trick.
- Cut the moment it leaves the ovenCut while warm -- the recipe does not say when to cut, but a thin sheet like this is far easier to part while still warm and flexible than after it has cooled and become brittle. Use a long thin blade, and lift the pieces with the "limber knife" the recipe calls for, or a thin offset spatula.
- "A cool oven"In period usage this is at the low end of the scale, somewhere around 250-300F on a modern dial, though no source gives a figure. The point is that a hotter oven browns the thin edges before the center dries out. Judge by color rather than by any set time.
- Pulverized sugarConfectioners' or powdered sugar. Period pulverized sugar was simply ground sugar, without the cornstarch modern powdered sugar carries; the substitution is still the right one.
- A tablespoon of gingerGround dried ginger, and it is not a misprint -- the batter is otherwise plain butter, sugar, flour and water, so the spice carries the whole cookie. Use fresh-smelling ground ginger; a jar that has sat for years will taste of dust.
- Spreading thinThe mixture is thick rather than pourable. "Thin" is not defined in the recipe; spread it out as evenly as you can with an offset spatula, working from the center, and a few drops more water will help it move.
- Why the pan must be coldA warm greased sheet melts the butter at the contact surface, the batter slides and pools, and the wafers bake to uneven thickness. Grease the pan, then chill it before spreading.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield, and the count depends entirely on how thin you spread and how you cut. Wafers like these soften in humid air; a few minutes in a low oven crisps them again.
Emma P. Ewing was one of the best-known American cooking teachers of the later nineteenth century, running cookery schools and teaching cookery on the Chautauqua circuit, and her name attached to a recipe carried weight in the domestic press of the 1880s and 1890s -- hence the attribution here. The wafer itself belongs to an older tradition than the soft drop cookie: a plain, thin, brittle sheet of sweetened dough, closer kin to the flat gingerbreads baked on irons and sheets in England and New England than to a molasses drop cookie. Note what is absent -- no egg, no saleratus, no molasses. Water and butter alone bind it, and the ginger and sugar do the rest, a cheap way to a keeping cookie out of the store cupboard rather than the henhouse.