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Chocolate Walnut Wafers
2 squares Lowney's Premium Chocolate, grated 1/4 cup milk 1 cup flour teaspoon vanilla 1 cup chopped walnuts teaspoon salt Cream butter; add dry ingredients, milk and flavoring. Spread on inverted pans which have been well buttered. Sprinkle with chopped nuts. Bake in moderate oven.
Crease immediately on removing from oven. See colored illustration, Plate XIV, opposite. ½ cup butter cup sugar 2 eggs ½ cup raisins seeded teaspoon salt
A thin, brittle butter wafer baked in a sheet on the underside of a pan and scored into bars while still hot. The method is closer to a shortbread slab than a drop cookie.
- The hinge: score while hotThese set hard as they cool and will shatter irregularly if left whole. Cut or crease them into bars within a minute of leaving the oven, while the sheet is still pliable.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "moderate" is conventionally read as roughly 350-375F. The batter is spread thin, so start checking early; it is done when the surface looks dry and the edges have browned.
- Inverted pansBaking on the underside of an overturned sheet pan lets you slide a long spatula straight under the wafer with no rim in the way. A modern rimless cookie sheet, well buttered, does the same job.
- Grated chocolateLowney's Premium was the company's plain cooking chocolate, sold in squares that at this period were generally an ounce each, so two squares is about 2 oz. Grate it cold on the coarse side of a box grater or pulse it in a processor.
- Ambiguous quantitiesSeveral measures in the ingredient list have lost their fractions -- the sugar, the vanilla and the salt are all given without them. Read the vanilla and salt as a teaspoon each at most, and treat the sugar amount as unrecoverable from this text alone.
- Spreading thinAn offset spatula and a light hand matter more than exact quantities here. Aim for about an eighth of an inch; any thicker and the centre stays soft instead of snapping.
- YieldA batch of this size will cover something like a large baking sheet and gives a few dozen small bars, depending how thin it is spread.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and belongs to a large family of promotional cookbooks issued by American food firms in the early twentieth century. The recipes are conventional household fare, but the chocolate here is specified by the company's own brand name, and the text refers the reader to colour plates at a time when illustrated cookbooks were still relatively uncommon. The wafer itself is a thin sheet-baked bar of a type that appears in period collections under names like chocolate fingers and nut wafers -- an economical way to get a large number of small cakes out of one pan and one baking.