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Vanilla Wafers
2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder. 1/3 cup butter and lard mixed 1 cup sugar 1 egg, well beaten 1/4 cup milk 2¼ cups flour ing Powder 2 level teaspoons Calumet Bak- 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons vanilla Cream butter, add sugar, milk and vanilla. Sift together thoroughly the flour, baking powder, salt and add. Roll as thin as possible, cut with round cutter, and bake in a moderate oven.
A plain rolled sugar cookie from a baking-powder company pamphlet, thin and crisp rather than soft. The method as printed is compressed, so a few things need filling in.
- Quantities1/3 cup fat total (the recipe says only "butter and lard mixed" and gives no proportion; equal parts, or all butter for a cleaner flavor, both work), 1 cup sugar, 1 egg, 1/4 cup milk, 2 1/4 cups flour, 2 level teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 2 teaspoons vanilla. That fat-to-flour ratio is low by modern cookie standards.
- The eggThe egg belongs with the creamed butter and sugar, beaten in before the milk. The written method skips over it.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350 to 375F; the recipe itself gives no temperature. Thin wafers on a light-colored sheet want roughly 7 to 9 minutes, until the edges are just tan; they crisp as they cool.
- Calumet baking powderA double-acting powder combining sodium aluminum sulfate with calcium acid phosphate, and the pamphlet exists to sell it. Any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes measure for measure.
- LardLard gives a short, tender crumb and was a common household shortening; the recipe does not specify a grade. Modern shortening works; butter alone spreads slightly more and browns faster.
- Rolling thinThe dough is stiff and handles best chilled at least an hour. Roll to about 1/8 inch on a lightly floured board, or between sheets of parchment to avoid working in extra flour, which turns the wafers hard rather than crisp.
- YieldSeveral dozen wafers from a 2-inch cutter, depending on how thin they are rolled. They keep a week in a tin and go soft if stored with anything moist.
"Reliable Recipes" was published by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, one of many branded cookbooks that food manufacturers gave away or sold for a few cents in the early twentieth century. The recipes are genuine and workable, but the leavened ones name the brand in the ingredient list, which is the point of the exercise. Vanilla wafers of this kind were a standard rolled cookie in American home baking before the commercial Nabisco version made the name a shelf product; bottled vanilla extract was commercially produced from the mid-nineteenth century and became steadily cheaper and more widely available thereafter.