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Chocolate Wafers
1 teaspoon vanilla 14 cups flour teaspoon salt 4 tablespoons Lowney's Premium Chocolate, melted Mix in the order given. Beat well. Pour into buttered pans in thin layers.
Bake in quick oven six to eight minutes. Cut in long narrow strips while hot, and serve cold. ½ cup butter 1 cup powdered sugar ½ cup milk
A thin sheet cookie baked in a shallow pan and cut into fingers while still warm. The transcription has lost several fractions, so read the ingredient list with care before scaling anything.
- The garbled quantities"14 cups flour" is almost certainly 1¼ cups, and the bare "teaspoon salt" was originally a fraction, most likely ¼ teaspoon. Treat the flour as a starting point and add only enough to make a batter that spreads thinly rather than a stiff dough.
- Order matters"Mix in the order given" points to a sequence lost in this transcription. The ingredients printed at the end here (butter, powdered sugar, milk) most likely stood at the head of the original list, which would mean creaming butter and sugar first, then the liquids, then flour and salt, with the melted chocolate worked in. That is inference from the method, not something this printing shows.
- Lowney's Premium ChocolateAn unsweetened baking chocolate, the house product this book exists to sell. Four tablespoons melted is roughly two ounces of solid chocolate; any unsweetened bar works, and the sugar in the recipe is calibrated for it.
- Quick ovenThe book's own term, usually read as roughly 400-425F. At that heat a thin layer sets in the six to eight minutes given, but chocolate batter scorches quickly at the edges — check at five.
- Thin layersSpread no more than about an eighth of an inch thick, using an offset spatula on a buttered rimmed sheet. Thickness is what decides whether these come out as wafers or as flat cake.
- Cut hot, cool flatThe recipe is explicit that the strips are cut while hot; a cooled sheet is liable to break unevenly, so score and cut as soon as the pan leaves the oven, then leave them on the sheet to crisp.
- YieldNone is given in the book. Expect several dozen fingers, depending on the pan used and how narrow the strips are cut.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and belongs to the large family of turn-of-the-century promotional cookbooks in which many recipes call for the firm's own product by name. Wafers of this kind — a thin sheet of rich batter baked fast and cut into fingers while warm — were a standard accompaniment to ice cream, fruit and after-dinner coffee in the period, when a dessert course often paired something cold with something crisp. The recipe calls for powdered rather than granulated sugar, though the book does not say why.