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Lemon Wafers
1 cup butter or shortening 2 cups sugar 3 eggs 3 tablespoons lemon-juice Flour Cream the butter or shortening, add the sugar and well-beaten eggs, and lemon-juice. Stir in flour enough to make as soft a dough as can be rolled. Roll very thin and shape with a cutter. Bake at 380 degrees F. for 10 min. This recipe may be used for vanilla, chocolate, or orange wafers.
A plain rolled cookie from the era when home ovens had just acquired thermostats, which is why the temperature is given as an oddly precise 380F. The only real difficulty is the open-ended flour.
- Flour quantityThe original gives no figure. Expect roughly 4 to 4 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour for this quantity of butter, sugar and egg; add it in stages and stop as soon as the dough holds together and no longer sticks to the board.
- Oven380F is between standard settings on modern dials. Bake at 375F and check at 8 minutes, since a wafer rolled truly thin colors fast at the edges.
- Roll thin, and chill firstThis is the hinge. The dough is soft and will tear or stretch at room temperature. Divide it, wrap, and refrigerate an hour before rolling to about 1/16 inch, working with one portion at a time and keeping the rest cold.
- Shortening versus butterButter gives better flavor and more spread; the shortening version holds its cut shape more sharply. Shortening sold today has largely been reformulated away from partially hydrogenated fat, but it still performs much as the older product did in a dough like this.
- LemonThree tablespoons of juice is a lot of liquid and only moderate flavor. Grated zest from the lemons carries far more aroma through baking; add it with the sugar.
- The variationsFor vanilla, substitute a tablespoon of extract for the juice; with less liquid in the bowl you will need correspondingly less flour. For orange, use juice and zest as for lemon. For chocolate, work in 3 to 4 tablespoons of cocoa with the first of the flour and expect to need slightly less flour overall.
- YieldA very large batch: cut at 2 inches and rolled as thin as the notes suggest, well over eight dozen wafers, depending on how thin they go. They keep well in a tin for a week and crisp again in a low oven.
Wafers of this kind are rolled cookies pared down to their essentials: fat, sugar, egg, flavoring, and only as much flour as the rolling pin demands. The New Delineator Recipes belongs to the late 1920s, when the Butterick Publishing Company's magazine The Delineator was feeding its readers standardized, tested recipes. A named figure like 380F fits a period in which oven thermostats were becoming common enough that a cookbook could give a number rather than telling the cook to test the oven with flour or a scrap of paper, though the precise reason for this particular figure is not recorded. The closing line, offering vanilla, chocolate or orange from the same base, reflects a habit of the period's household cookery writing: give one reliable dough and let it stand in for four cookies, saving both space on the page and effort in the kitchen.