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Oat Wafers
1 cup Rolled Oats 1 cup wheat preparation 1 cup flour 1 tablespoon sugar 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons butter Warm Water Mix the dry ingredients. Work in the butter and add enough water to hold the ingredients together. Place on a floured board and roll as thinly as possible. Shape with a cutter or cut in strips, using a sharp knife. Bake on a buttered sheet in a slow oven until delicately browned.
A plain cracker dough of the sort that filled the bread chapter of wartime and vegetarian cookbooks. The whole success of it is in how thin you roll it.
- "Wheat preparation"This is genuinely ambiguous. In books of this period it usually means a packaged breakfast wheat cereal — farina or Cream of Wheat, or a flaked or shredded whole wheat. Either reading works: fine farina gives a sandy, snappy wafer, flaked wheat a coarser one. Do not substitute more white flour, which loses the point.
- Rolled oatsOld-fashioned rolled oats, not instant or steel-cut. If you want a finer, less shaggy wafer, pulse them briefly in a food processor first.
- Slow oven300F, or up to 325F if the wafers are very thin. The low heat is deliberate — these dry out as much as they bake, which is what makes them keep.
- WaterWarm water helps the butter distribute and the cereal soften. Add it a tablespoon at a time; the dough should just clump when pressed, not feel wet. Roughly a third to half a cup, depending on how thirsty the wheat preparation is.
- Rolling"As thinly as possible" is the hinge. Anything thicker than about 1/8 inch bakes to a hard biscuit rather than a wafer. Rolling directly on the buttered sheet and cutting in place saves transferring fragile sheets of dough.
- Doneness"Delicately browned" means pale gold at the edges only, about 15-20 minutes. They crisp as they cool, so a wafer that still bends slightly on the sheet is done.
- YieldAbout 40 small wafers or two dozen larger ones. Cool completely and store airtight; any trapped steam softens them within hours.
Wafers like these belong to the era when packaged breakfast cereals were new enough to be treated as pantry staples in their own right — a cook was expected to have a box of rolled oats and some "wheat preparation" on the shelf and to use them in baking as readily as at breakfast. Meatless cookbooks of the period often included crackers of this kind: built from whole grains and a little butter, they were cheap and kept well, and they suited the argument that a meal without meat need not be a meal without substance. The style recalls the older tradition of hard oatcakes and ship's biscuit, though the sugar and butter here mark it as a table cracker rather than a keeping bread. Health-reform publishers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries printed wafers of this sort, and the format — mix, roll thin, bake slow — has changed little since.