Wafers
1½ cup flour 1 teaspoon vanilla teaspoon salt Cream the butter and add other ingredients. Spread on inverted buttered tins. Bake in quick oven, cut in squares, and roll. If this is done on top of the range, there will be less danger of the wafers breaking.
The ingredient list as printed has lost most of its quantities — butter and sugar are called for in the method but never given amounts, and the salt is listed as a bare "teaspoon" with no fraction. Treat this as a technique note for rolled wafers rather than a complete formula.
- The missing amountsOnly the flour (1½ cups), vanilla (1 teaspoon) and an unspecified quantity of salt survive. The method says to cream the butter, but no amount is given for it, and no sugar is listed or mentioned at all; there is no honest way to reconstruct the batter from the text. Comparable wafer batters of the period run roughly equal weights of butter, sugar and flour with a little liquid, but that is inference, not what this page says.
- "Quick oven"Roughly 400-425F. Wafers spread thin bake very fast at that heat, and the edges colour well before the centre, so watch rather than time.
- Inverted buttered tinsThe batter goes on the underside of a baking sheet or the bottom of an overturned cake tin — a flat, rimless surface so a knife can reach the whole sheet to cut squares without a lip in the way. A modern flat sheet pan or a silicone mat works the same way.
- Spread thinAn offset spatula and a very thin, even layer are what make these wafers rather than cookies. Thick patches stay soft and will not take a curl.
- Why work on top of the rangeThis is the hinge. The wafers are pliable for perhaps twenty seconds after leaving the oven; once cool they shatter. Keeping the pan over gentle heat while you cut and roll holds them workable. On a modern stove, a low burner or a warm oven with the door ajar does the same.
- RollingRoll each square around the handle of a wooden spoon, a chopstick or a metal cone, seam down, and let it set for a few seconds before sliding it off. Anything that stiffens before you reach it can be returned to the warm oven for a moment to soften.
- Yield and servingWith the butter and sugar missing there is no way to fix a yield; a batter built on 1½ cups flour and spread thin would cover more than one sheet and give a few dozen small rolled wafers, but that is an estimate. Crisp rolled wafers of this kind were generally served alongside ice cream, custards or whipped cream, and they go limp in humid air -- store airtight.
Rolled wafers of this kind are related to the thin batter cakes baked between hinged irons in European kitchens -- the French gaufre and its relatives, from which the English word 'wafer' derives -- and by the later nineteenth century American cookbooks were also baking such batters on a flat tin in the oven, where a whole sheet could be baked and then cut and curled while hot. A crisp, neutral wafer was a standard partner to ice cream and cold puddings. The instruction to work over the range suits a coal or wood stove kitchen, where a warm surface was always available at no extra cost; the page also reached print with its butter and sugar quantities missing from the list.