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Virginia Wafers
4 cups sifted flour. 4 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1½ cups sweet milk 1 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon butter or lard Mix same as Standard Biscuit, and divide dough in pieces large as walnuts. Roll to 1/16 inch thick and bake in quick oven to a light brown. Serve with salads instead of crackers.
A cracker recipe from a baking powder company's promotional booklet, which assumes you have already read its Standard Biscuit formula. Read the notes on flour before you start, since the quantity is missing from the text as printed.
- The flour is not listedThe ingredient list gives leavening, milk, salt and fat but no flour, because the reader was expected to work from the book's Standard Biscuit proportions. The usual convention of about 1 level teaspoon of baking powder per cup of flour would put this near 4 cups of all-purpose flour for the 4 teaspoons called for; add it gradually until the dough is stiff enough to roll thin without tearing.
- "Mix same as Standard Biscuit"That means sifting the dry ingredients together, cutting in the fat until it disappears into the flour, then adding the milk all at once and handling the dough as little as possible. Overworking it makes the wafers tough rather than crisp.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh whole milk, specified only to distinguish it from the soured milk or buttermilk that a soda-leavened dough would call for.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-450F. At 1/16 inch these bake very fast, on the order of 5 to 8 minutes, so watch them from the four-minute mark and pull them when the edges color.
- Calumet baking powderA double-acting powder, still sold. Any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes measure for measure; the four level teaspoons here are for the full flour quantity, not for a cup or two.
- Rolling to 1/16 inchThis is the hinge of the recipe. A walnut of dough rolled that thin gives a wafer of roughly three to five inches across depending on the size of the piece, and any thicker spot will stay soft and bready in the middle. Roll on a lightly floured board, prick each round with a fork to keep it from ballooning, and bake on an ungreased sheet.
- Butter or lardOne tablespoon for the whole batch is a very lean dough, closer to a cracker than a biscuit. Lard gives a slightly shorter, flakier snap; butter gives more flavor.
- Yield and keepingExpect about three dozen wafers. Cool them completely on a rack and store airtight, since they pick up humidity quickly and go leathery; a few minutes in a low oven will crisp them again.
Reliable Recipes was published by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, and it exists to put the brand name into the ingredient list of every page. That commercial purpose explains the recipe's odd shape here: cross-references such as "mix same as Standard Biscuit" saved printing costs, and the same cross-reference accounts for the flour's absence from the list. The wafer itself belongs to a long Southern tradition of very thin, hard, unsweetened biscuit-doughs -- beaten biscuit being the best-known relative -- served in place of bought crackers with salads, soups and cheese. Beaten biscuit got its crispness from prolonged pounding, usually said to work air into the dough and develop its gluten, a job often done with a mallet or a hand-cranked brake; chemical leavening, which is what Calumet was advertising, let a cook get a comparable thin snap in a fraction of the time. The name "Virginia" here is a regional gesture toward that older hand-worked cracker rather than a claim about any particular recorded origin.