Nut Wafers
Sprinkle finely chopped nuts on the wafers just before baking. ½ cup butter 1 cup sugar
This is a variation note rather than a standalone recipe: it belongs to a run of wafer recipes and assumes the base dough printed alongside it. What survives on this page is the topping instruction plus the head of an ingredient list, so treat it as a method rather than a formula.
- The text is incompleteHalf a cup of butter and a cup of sugar is only the head of the ingredient list; the remainder, including whatever flour and flavouring the dough called for, is missing from the page. Use a rolled wafer or sugar-cookie dough built on that ratio rather than trying to reconstruct the missing lines exactly.
- The one instruction that mattersThe nuts go on just before baking, onto the raw surface, so that they set into the wafer as it bakes rather than being mixed through the dough or scattered on afterwards.
- Chop finelyWafers are rolled thin, and coarse pieces sit proud of the surface and scorch before the base sets. Almonds, walnuts or pecans chopped to the size of coarse sand behave best.
- OvenBake hot and fast. Thin wafers of this kind take only a few minutes and go from pale to dark very quickly, so watch the edges rather than the clock.
- Butter measureHalf a cup is about 4 oz. The recipe already gives it in cups, so no conversion is needed here.
- RollingRoll as thin as the dough will bear, about 1/8 inch, and chill the sheet before cutting. Warm butter-heavy dough tears and the nuts push through.
- Yield and keepingWith the flour quantity lost, the yield cannot be fixed from the page. Wafers of this kind crisp as they cool and keep for some days in a tin; they soften quickly in a humid kitchen.
Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and belongs to the large family of turn-of-the-century cookbooks published by food firms to put their product into domestic kitchens. Thin crisp wafers baked on flat sheets were a standard accompaniment to ices, chocolate and after-dinner coffee in this period, valued because they could be made from a small quantity of butter and sugar and stored in a tin, and because a sprinkling of chopped nuts turned one dough into an apparently new dish.