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Rolled Wafers
3 eggs. 1 full tablespoon butter. 1 cup sugar. 1 pint flour. Beat yolks and sugar together, add whites beaten stiff. Then flour, put a small spoonful in wafer iron, cook and roll while hot.
A four-ingredient batter for a hinged wafer iron, of the sort rolled into cylinders or cones while still pliable. The instructions are compressed to the point of leaving out a step, so read the whole thing before heating the iron.
- The butter is orphanedButter appears in the ingredient list but never in the method. Cream it with the sugar and yolks, or melt it and beat it in before the flour goes in; either works, and without it the wafers are dry and brittle.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume, so a pint means 2 cups, roughly 8 to 9 oz. This gives a very stiff batter closer to a dough — expect to spread each spoonful with the iron itself rather than pour it.
- No liquid at allThere is no milk or water here, which is deliberate in a wafer batter but leaves little margin. If the mixture will not flatten under the iron, a tablespoon or two of milk brings it into line without ruining the crispness.
- The wafer ironA hinged stovetop iron — krumkake, pizzelle or gaufrette style — heated over direct flame, not a modern electric waffle maker. Grease it lightly to begin with, and re-grease if the wafers start to stick; there is only a tablespoon of butter in the whole batch.
- Roll while hot is the whole recipeA wafer sets crisp within seconds of leaving the iron. Have a wooden cone or dowel ready beside the stove and roll the moment it comes off; a wafer that has cooled flat will shatter rather than bend.
- Work one at a timeCook a single wafer per round even if the iron holds more. Two hot wafers means the second one hardens while you roll the first.
- YieldPerhaps two to three dozen wafers from a small spoonful each, though this depends heavily on the size of the iron. They keep for some days in a tin and go soft in humid weather.
- Filed oddlyIf the page sits among the vegetable recipes, that looks like a printing or indexing slip rather than any clue about the dish. It is a plain sweet wafer.
Rolled wafers belong to a family of thin iron-baked batters that runs across much of Europe — the Norwegian krumkake, the Italian pizzelle, the French gaufrette — all made on a pair of hinged plates held over the fire and all depending on the same trick of shaping the wafer in the few seconds before it hardens. In American cookbooks of Mrs. Wilson's era the wafer iron is often said to have been a familiar piece of household ironmongery, which may be why the recipe assumes one and does not explain it. Mrs. Wilson wrote for the Philadelphia Public Ledger during and after the First World War, and her books are heavy with this kind of terse, telegraphic formula — ingredients as a bare list, method in a single run-on line — a style shaped by newspaper column inches and by the assumption that her readers already knew the equipment and needed only the proportions.