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Almond Wafers
1/4 cup butter 1/2 cup pulverized sugar 2 whites of egg 1 tablespoon milk 1 1/4 cups flour 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract 1/8 teaspoon almond extract Blanched almonds Cream the butter, and gradually mix in the sugar. Reserve one-half of the egg white with which to glaze the cakes. Beat the remaining egg white, and add to the creamed butter and sugar. Then add the flavoring, the milk and the flour. Roll the dough, a little at a time, into thin sheets, and cut into fancy shapes. Then bake in buttered tins. Arrange six or eight halves of blanched almonds, cut lengthwise, about the center of each cake in such a way as to represent the petals of a flower. Brush with the white of an egg. Sprinkle with granulated sugar, and bake in a moderate oven till of a delicate brown color.
A thin rolled butter cookie with an almond-petal top, straightforward apart from a few dated terms and one genuinely unclear measurement.
- Pulverized sugarFinely powdered sugar, not granulated; the nearest modern equivalent is confectioners' (powdered) sugar, though that contains cornstarch and the period article did not. It keeps the dough fine-grained and easy to roll thin. The sugar sprinkled on top at the end is granulated, as the recipe specifies.
- The egg-white instruction is ambiguous"Reserve one-half of the egg white" most likely means reserve one of the two whites for glazing, leaving one to go into the dough. It could also mean half of the combined whites, which comes to the same thing. Either reading gives you roughly one white in the dough and one for the brush.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as somewhere around 350F. Because these are rolled thin they will bake quickly, so watch them and pull them when the edges are pale gold rather than waiting for an even brown all over; the original's 'delicate brown' comes fast at this thickness.
- Buttered tinsFlat baking sheets, greased. Parchment is better here: the glaze and sugar leak and caramelize, and buttered pans make the wafers stick where the syrup pools.
- Rolling thinAbout 1/8 inch. The dough is soft from a quarter cup of butter and one white; chill it for 30 minutes before rolling, and work with a small portion at a time as directed, keeping the rest cold.
- Blanched almondsBuy blanched whole almonds and split them lengthwise with a paring knife while they are still slightly damp, or pour boiling water over skin-on almonds, stand two minutes, and slip the skins off. Commercial sliced almonds are cut too thin to hold the petal shape.
- Glaze and sugarBrush the reserved white on lightly and only after the almonds are set in place, so it cements them down. A heavy hand with the white leaves a rubbery film.
- YieldRoughly three to four dozen wafers, depending on the cutter. They keep a week in a tin and are crisp rather than chewy.
Recipes using whites of egg were commonly grouped together in cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries -- wafers, macaroons, meringues, white cakes, boiled icings -- as a use for the whites left over when yolks went into custards, sauces and rich cakes. The almond-petal decoration belongs to the same period's fondness for fancy cutters and hand-arranged trims on plain doughs, an inexpensive way to make a butter cookie look like confectionery.