Home › Gingerbreads, Cookies, And Wafers › Scotch Wafers
Scotch Wafers
1 cup fine oatmeal. 1 cup Rolled Oats 2 cups flour 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon soda 1/4 cup butter or lard 1/2 cup hot water 1/4 cup sugar Mix first six ingredients. Melt shortening in water and add to first mixture. Toss on a floured board, pat, and roll as thinly as possible. Shape with a cutter, or with a sharp knife cut in strips. Bake on a buttered sheet in a slow oven. These are well adapted for children's luncheons, and are much enjoyed by the convalescent, taken with a glass of milk. 1 egg 1/4 cup sugar 1/4 cup thin cream 1/4 cup milk
A plain oat cracker rather than a sweet biscuit, and the dough behaves like pastry: the thinner you get it, the better it bakes. A few things in the printed text need sorting out before you start.
- The stray ingredients at the endThe egg, sugar, cream and milk listed after the final sentence do not belong to this dough; they appear to be the opening ingredient line of the next recipe on the page. Ignore them.
- "First six ingredients"The printed list runs to seven items, so the count does not work as written. The dry things are oats, flour, salt, soda and sugar — five as printed — with the shortening handled separately in the next sentence. Mix the dry ingredients together, then add the fat melted in the hot water.
- Slow ovenRoughly 250–300°F by modern equivalents. These are meant to dry out and crisp rather than colour, so a low steady heat is the point; 15 to 25 minutes depending on thickness, until firm and only faintly tan at the edges.
- Rolled oats then and nowThe rolled oats of this period were coarser and thicker than most supermarket flakes. Old-fashioned rolled oats are the right substitute; quick oats will give a finer, sandier wafer, and steel-cut will not soften enough in the hot water.
- Butter or lardEither works. Lard gives a shorter, more crumbly cracker and a flatter flavour; butter browns faster, so watch the edges toward the end of the bake.
- Roll thin, and mean itThis is the hinge. At 1/8 inch or less the wafers snap; any thicker and they stay leathery in the middle no matter how long they sit in the oven. Roll between the board and a sheet of parchment if the dough tears.
- Handle warmThe dough is easiest to roll while the hot water is still working on the oats. Once it cools it stiffens and cracks at the edges — a few drops of warm water will bring it back.
- YieldHard to pin down, as it depends entirely on how thin you get the dough; this quantity rolled to 1/8 inch will give well over 30 two-inch wafers. They keep a week in a tin and can be re-crisped for five minutes in a low oven.
Oatcakes are the oldest baking of the Scottish kitchen, traditionally cooked on a girdle rather than in an oven and eaten with cheese, herring or milk; this version has been softened for an American range and a wheat-flour pantry, with two parts flour to one of oats. Its appearance in an American cookbook owes a good deal to the rolled-oat mills that made flaked oats a cheap national grocery in the last quarter of the nineteenth century — before that, an American cook wanting oats had to deal with groats or meal. The closing note about convalescents is not an aside but a whole genre: household manuals of the period devoted long sections to invalid cookery, and a dry, bland, easily digested biscuit taken with milk was standard sickroom fare at a time when recovery from fever meant weeks of careful feeding at home.