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Oatmeal Wafers
2 tablespoons butter ½ teaspoon salt cup hot milk 1 teaspoon lemon juice Mix butter and milk; when cool, add remaining ingredients. Roll very thin, shape in squares, and bake in a slow oven.
A plain, unsweetened oat wafer of the sort served with cheese, soup or salad rather than as a cookie. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete, so treat this as a method to follow rather than a formula to measure against.
- Missing quantitiesNo amount is given for the oatmeal itself, and the milk measure has lost its fraction. Neither figure can be honestly reconstructed from the rest of the list; a comparable oat wafer recipe will give workable proportions.
- What "oatmeal" meantIn American cookbooks of this period "oatmeal" could mean either rolled oats or a finer ground meal, and the recipe does not say which. For a wafer that rolls thin without tearing, ground or pulsed oats behave better than whole flakes.
- A slow ovenThe book gives no temperature; 'slow' in this period corresponds to roughly 275-325F. These wafers are dried out as much as baked, and a hotter oven browns the edges before the centers lose their moisture.
- Roll very thinThis is the hinge of the recipe. Oat dough with no sugar and little fat will not spread in the oven, so whatever thickness you roll is the thickness you eat. Roll between two sheets of parchment to keep it from sticking.
- Cool the butter and milkThe recipe does say to let the mixture cool before adding the rest. The likely reason is that hot milk poured onto the dry ingredients makes a slack, gummy paste that cannot be rolled.
- Not sweetThere is no sugar here, and the lemon juice and salt point the wafer savory. Expect something closer to an oatcake or a cracker than to an oatmeal cookie.
- Timing and donenessThin wafers in a slow oven generally want somewhere around 15 to 20 minutes. They should be dry and barely colored; they crisp further as they cool on a rack.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it is one of the maker-sponsored promotional cookbooks of the era. Oat wafers of this kind sit in the same tradition as the Scottish and northern English oatcake, and by the 1900s thin oat biscuits were a familiar accompaniment to cheese, sold commercially alongside water biscuits. The unsweetened, salted formula here belongs to that savory line rather than to the sweet oatmeal cookie.