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English Rolled Wafers II
To English Rolled Wafers I, add one and one-half cups rolled oats. 2 tablespoons brown sugar 1/4 cup butter 1/4 cup boiling water ½ cup brown sugar
This is a variation, not a standalone recipe: it assumes you have English Rolled Wafers I in front of you. The ingredient list as printed is also garbled, so read it with care before shopping.
- The printed list is corruptTwo separate brown sugar quantities appear (2 tablespoons and 1½ cups). Treat the base recipe's proportions as authoritative and the oats as the only certain addition; the butter, boiling water and sugar figures look like a stray fragment, though without English Rolled Wafers I in front of us the point cannot be settled.
- Rolled oats in 1896Rolled oats of the period were closer to today's old-fashioned oats, not instant. Quick oats will dissolve into the batter and cost you the texture the addition is there to supply.
- The hinge: roll them hotA rolled wafer is shaped in the seconds after it leaves the oven, over a rolling pin, a broom handle or the greased handle of a wooden spoon. Once cool it snaps. Bake only four or five to a sheet, and if the last ones stiffen, put the pan back in the oven for fifteen seconds to soften them again.
- Oven heatThe recipe as printed gives no temperature. Thin wafers generally want a moderately hot oven; if you work at around 375°F, start watching from six minutes on. They go from pale gold at the edges to burnt very quickly, and oats scorch faster than plain batter.
- SpreadThese batters tend to run. Leave three inches between spoonfuls on a parchment-lined sheet; wafers of this kind were commonly baked on buttered tins, which is workable but makes lifting them intact harder.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe states no yield, and the base recipe's quantities are unknown, so the count will depend on how thin you spread them. Store them airtight the moment they are cold — humidity turns them leathery within hours, and no amount of re-crisping fully restores the snap.
Rolled wafers belong to a long European line of thin batters baked or ironed flat and curled while pliable — the same principle behind the brandy snap, the Norwegian krumkake and the French cigarette russe. Fannie Farmer's book, first published in 1896 for the Boston Cooking School, included such things among its baked goods, where they served as the light accompaniment to ice cream, fruit or afternoon tea. The oat version reflects the late-nineteenth-century enthusiasm for rolled oats, which had only recently become a cheap, uniform commercial product in American kitchens; adding them to a wafer batter gives something close in spirit to a Scottish oat biscuit, thinned and curled. That this entry survives as a garbled fragment is most likely a transcription artefact.