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Vanilla Wafers
equal proportions 1/3 cup butter and lard in 1 cup sugar 1 egg 1/4 cup milk 2 cups flour 2 teaspoons baking powder ½ teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons vanilla Cream the butter, add sugar, egg well beaten, milk, and vanilla. Mix and sift dry ingredients and add to first mixture. Proceed as with Ginger Snaps. 1/3 cup butter 1 cup sugar 2 eggs 1/2 cup thin cream
A plain rolled vanilla cookie from the era when butter was routinely stretched with lard. The dough is stiff, meant to be chilled, rolled very thin and cut — the wafer texture comes from thickness, not from any special technique.
- The fatThe recipe calls for equal proportions of butter and lard totalling 1/3 cup — about 2 2/3 tablespoons of each. All butter works and tastes better; lard was there for cheapness and for the short, sandy crumb it gives. Modern shortening behaves similarly to lard here.
- The salt figure is out of range1 1/2 teaspoons of salt in two cups of flour would be aggressively salty for a sweet wafer, and the printed figure is most likely a misreading of a smaller fraction. Treat it as 1/4 teaspoon or less, particularly if you are using salted butter.
- "Proceed as with Ginger Snaps"That means chill the dough thoroughly, roll it as thin as you can manage on a floured board, cut with a round cutter and bake on greased sheets. The chilling is not optional — a soft dough with this much sugar cannot be rolled thin.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Thin rolled wafers want a moderate oven, 350F, and 6 to 9 minutes; they are done when the edges brown and the centres still look pale. They crisp as they cool.
- Thickness decides everythingRolled at 1/8 inch these are soft cookies; at 1/16 inch they are wafers. Roll a test batch and adjust before committing the dough.
- VanillaTwo teaspoons is a generous amount for a recipe of this size and reflects the fact that the flavour has to carry an otherwise plain cookie. Use real extract, not imitation, since there is nothing else to hide behind.
- YieldRoughly four to five dozen two-inch wafers, depending on how thin you roll. They keep a week in a tin and go soft in humid weather; re-crisp in a low oven.
Fannie Farmer's cookie chapter is a study in economy: nearly every recipe splits the fat between butter and lard, the cheaper rendered pork fat. The vanilla wafer belongs to the family of thin rolled sugar cookies that European bakers had made for centuries, but its American form is often said to owe a great deal to the arrival of more reliable, affordable vanilla extract in the second half of the nineteenth century — before that, vanilla was a luxury flavouring reserved for creams and ices rather than everyday cookies. The instruction to "proceed as with Ginger Snaps" is typical of the book's method: Farmer taught technique once and then cross-referenced it, which was part of what made the volume feel like a teaching manual rather than a collection of receipts.