Home › Cakes › Chocolate Wafers
Chocolate Wafers
2 pounds sugar 3 eggs 1/2 pound grated chocolate 14 tablespoons melted lard and butter Flour to make dough 2 teaspoons cinnamon Beat the eggs with the sugar; add the other ingredients, melting the chocolate first over hot water, and using enough flour to make a dough that can be rolled very thin. Roll; cut with a round biscuit cutter and bake on buttered tins in a quick oven.
A large, old-fashioned rolled cookie built on a chocolate that is not the chocolate on a modern shelf. The proportions are for a household baking by the tinful, and the page carries a stray fragment from the recipe that followed it.
- The stray last line"3/4 cup butter 1 cup sugar" -- appears to be a fragment of a neighbouring recipe rather than part of these wafers. Ignore it; nothing in the method calls for it.
- Grated chocolateIn a recipe of this period this means a hard cake of unsweetened chocolate grated on a box grater, not chips or couverture. Half a pound of unsweetened baking chocolate, chopped and melted over hot water, is the direct equivalent, and it is what the two pounds of sugar are balancing.
- Scale it downTwo pounds of sugar is about 4 1/2 cups, and the batch will run to a very large number of thin wafers. Dividing the recipe into thirds gives a manageable dough built on one egg.
- Lard and butterFourteen tablespoons is just under a cup, roughly 7 oz, split between the two fats as you like. Lard keeps the wafer short and crisp; all butter gives more flavour and slightly more spread.
- "Flour to make dough"Add flour until the mass just holds together and no longer sticks to the board — stop as soon as it will roll. Too much flour here turns a snapping wafer into a dry biscuit, and the dough rolls far more easily after an hour in the refrigerator.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-425F as a modern approximation; the book gives no temperature. At that heat thin wafers are done in about 5 to 7 minutes; they will still look soft at the edges and will crisp as they cool. With this much sugar they go from set to scorched quickly, so watch the first tray and time the rest by it.
- Buttered tinsParchment on a flat sheet does the same job with less risk of the sugary undersides sticking. Lift the wafers off while barely warm — cold, they cement themselves down.
- YieldRolled very thin and cut with a 2-inch cutter, the full quantity makes a very large batch, on the order of several hundred wafers; any figure is a rough estimate.
The wafer itself belongs to an older tradition of thin rolled-and-cut spice cookies, closer to what is often described as a German or Pennsylvania-German cinnamon wafer than to the soft chocolate cookies that came later. What dates it most clearly is the chocolate: block unsweetened chocolate, sold to be grated, was the standard household form well into the twentieth century, and recipes of this period routinely pair it with enormous quantities of sugar to compensate. The mix of lard and butter is equally of its time — lard is generally said to have been the everyday shortening in American kitchens, with butter used alongside it for flavour rather than in place of it.