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Perfect Cream Wafers
2 cups flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1/4 cup sugar Pinch of salt Cream Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly and moisten them with cream. Add just enough cream to make the dough soft enough to roll. If too much is added the wafers will not be crisp. Roll the dough very thin; cut into squares and bake until lightly browned.
A four-ingredient cracker whose success rests entirely on restraint with the cream. The original assumes a cook who knows her own oven, so the numbers below fill the gaps.
- The hinge: add cream by the spoonfulThe dough should just come together and no more — stiff enough to hold a rolled sheet, barely tacky. Extra cream steams in the oven and gives you a soft biscuit rather than a wafer, which is exactly what the recipe warns against.
- Which creamBefore dairy fat grades were standardised, household "cream" could be anything from what we would call half-and-half to heavy cream. Heavy cream works and gives the crispest result; figure on roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup for 2 cups of flour, added gradually.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Thin wafers want a fairly quick oven, 400°F, on the upper rack. They colour at the edges in 6 to 9 minutes and go from pale to burnt quickly, so watch the last two minutes.
- Roll thinner than feels sensible"Very thin" means about 1/16 inch — thin enough to see the shadow of your hand through the sheet. Roll between parchment if the dough tears, and prick the squares with a fork to keep them flat.
- Baking powder in 1900Baking powder -- Period baking powders were commonly single-acting, releasing their gas on wetting rather than in two stages as modern double-acting powders do. The recipe's 2 teaspoons for 2 cups of flour is within normal modern proportions, but a crisp wafer needs little lift, and 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons is enough to avoid any chemical aftertaste.
- CuttingA pastry wheel or pizza cutter on the rolled sheet is faster than a cutter and wastes nothing. Two-inch squares are a sensible size for serving alongside ice cream.
- Yield and keepingSeveral dozen 2-inch wafers, depending entirely on how thin the sheet is rolled. Cool completely on a rack and store airtight -- they take up humidity quickly and can be re-crisped for a few minutes in a low oven.
Wafers of this kind belong to the ice-cream table rather than the bread basket, which is why a flour-and-cream cracker turns up filed under frozen desserts. Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a serving of ice cream, sherbet or frozen pudding was expected to arrive with something thin and dry beside it — a rolled wafer, a lady finger, a plain cracker — both to give the spoon a companion and to keep the course from being nothing but cold sweetness. The recipe's economy is characteristic of the period's cream cookery: cream supplies fat, moisture and richness at once, so no butter or egg is called for. The terse, assumption-heavy style here — no oven setting, no yield, no baking time beyond "until lightly browned" — reflects a book written for someone already standing at her own range.