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Lemon Wafers
2 cups sugar
1 cup butter or shortening
3 eggs
3 tablespoons lemon-juice
Flour
Cream the butter or shortening, add the sugar and well-beaten soft eggs, and lemon-juice. Stir in flour enough to make as soft a a dough as can be rolled. Roll very thin and shape with a cutter. Bake at 380° F. for 10 min. This recipe may be used for vanilla, chocolate, or orange wafers.
A plain rolled sugar-cookie dough flavoured with lemon juice, written for a cook who could judge flour by feel. The two things the original leaves to you are the amount of flour and how cold the dough is when it meets the rolling pin.
- The flour is up to youNo quantity is given because the correct amount is whatever makes a dough just stiff enough to roll. Expect somewhere between 4 and 5 cups of all-purpose flour; add it in stages and stop the moment the dough holds together without sticking to the board. Overshooting gives a dry, tough wafer rather than a crisp one.
- Chill before rollingA dough this rich in butter will slump and tear at room temperature. An hour in the refrigerator, rolled out in two or three batches while the rest stays cold, is the difference between a wafer and a smear.
- 380°F is not a typoPrecise oven figures like this belong to the period when thermostatically controlled ovens were coming into household use. Any oven set to 375°F will do the same job.
- Ten minutes is the outside limit"Very thin" means about 1/8 inch or less, and at that thickness the wafers are done when the edges just colour — often at 7 or 8 minutes. Watch the first tray and set your timing from it.
- "Well-beaten soft eggs"Most likely means eggs beaten until light and loose, not separated or whipped stiff. Three eggs of ordinary size.
- Lemon juice alone is faintThree tablespoons of juice mostly reads as moisture once baked. The zest of two lemons, creamed with the butter and sugar, carries far more flavour.
- The variationsFor vanilla, replace the juice with a tablespoon of extract and a little milk; for orange, swap juice and zest directly. For chocolate, substitute 1/4 cup of the flour with cocoa and drop the lemon juice, adding milk to reach the same rollable consistency.
- YieldUnstated in the original. Rolled very thin and cut small, this quantity makes a very large batch -- worth knowing before you commit the whole of it.
The Butterick Publishing Company sold dress patterns, and its cookbooks carried the same logic: a single reliable base that could be cut to several shapes. That is exactly what this entry is — one creamed-butter rolled dough with a closing line offering vanilla, chocolate or orange, so the household cook learns one procedure and gets four tins of cookies from it. The word wafer here means only that the dough is rolled very thin and crisp. The stated oven temperature is the period detail worth noticing: earlier American cookbooks said "a quick oven" or told you to count how long you could hold your hand in it, and the shift to a printed number tracks the arrival of the thermostatically controlled gas range in ordinary kitchens in the early decades of the twentieth century.