Cornucopias
Shape wafers as soon as taken from the oven. Fill with whipped cream, or cream fillings of various flavors.
This is an assembly note rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes the thin wafer batter given just above it in the book. Everything here depends on working fast while the wafers are still hot and pliable.
- Shape within secondsA thin wafer stays flexible for perhaps 10 to 20 seconds off the sheet. Bake four or five at a time at most, and roll each around a cone form the instant it can be lifted; a wafer that has set flat will shatter rather than bend.
- If they harden anywayReturn the pan to the oven for 30 seconds and the wafers soften again. This can be repeated once or twice without harm.
- The cone formMetal cream-horn or krumkake cones are sold for this; a cone of heavy foil or rolled parchment works. Lightly butter it or the sugar in the wafer will weld itself on.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature; it says only "as soon as taken from the oven." Wafer batters of this type are generally baked hot, and colour is the guide rather than the clock: bake until the edges brown and the centres are still pale.
- Fill at the last momentWhipped cream turns a wafer soft within 20 to 30 minutes. Store the shaped shells airtight, in dry air, and pipe them just before they go to the table.
- The "cream fillings of various flavors"The recipe does not specify which; a cooked custard-style cream is the usual candidate. Whatever is used, cool it fully and beat it smooth before piping, or it will tear the shell.
The cornucopia, or horn of plenty, was a standard sweet-course conceit in late Victorian and Edwardian American cookery: the same rolled-wafer trick appears as "cornets," "cream horns," and in Scandinavian kitchens as krumkake, all built on a hot, sugary batter that is pliable for a few seconds and brittle forever after. Lowney's Cook Book (compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer) belongs to the genre of cookbooks issued by food companies to sell an ingredient, which is why the cream fillings so often circle back to chocolate and cocoa. The rolled wafer cone is also generally traced as the ancestor of the ice cream cone, popularized at fairs and expositions in the first years of the twentieth century — the confectioner's technique here is identical, only the filling differs.