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Chocolate Wafers
Whisk the whites of two eggs, then mix them with four ounces of grated chocolate, half a pound of powdered sugar and enough flour to form a stiff paste. Roll out thin, cut into cakes and lay on baking-tin and bake for fifteen minutes. When cooked roll them, one at a time, around the handle of a wooden spoon.
A stiff meringue-and-chocolate paste rolled thin, baked, and curled while still hot into cigarette-style tuiles. The original gives no oven temperature and no flour quantity, so both need judgment.
- The hinge: curl them hotThe wafers are pliable for perhaps twenty seconds after leaving the oven and turn brittle as they cool. Bake six or eight at a time so you can roll each one around the spoon handle before the tray goes cold; anything that has stiffened can be returned to the oven for a few seconds to soften again.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. These are thin sugar wafers that scorch easily, so 325-350F is the working range, on the lower end if your baking sheet is dark.
- Fifteen minutes is longThat timing suits a thicker cake or a cooling nineteenth-century oven. Rolled genuinely thin, the wafers are set at the edges in 7-10 minutes. Start checking early; overbaked ones will crack instead of curling.
- "Grated chocolate"At this date chocolate came to the kitchen as a hard block to be grated on a rasp, though whether unsweetened or lightly sweetened the recipe does not say. Four ounces of modern unsweetened or 70% chocolate, finely grated (not melted, or the paste will not take flour properly), is a defensible reading. With today's semisweet the wafers will be very sweet indeed given the half pound of sugar.
- Quantities in modern termsFour ounces chocolate is roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups grated, depending how fine the rasp; half a pound of powdered sugar is roughly 1 3/4 to 2 cups. The flour is deliberately open-ended -- expect somewhere near 1/2 to 3/4 cup to reach a paste stiff enough to roll, and add it a spoonful at a time.
- Rolling the pasteThe dough is sticky and short on fat. Roll it between sheets of parchment to about 1/8 inch, chill briefly if it fights you, then cut and slide the parchment onto the tray. Bake on parchment or a silicone mat rather than a bare greased tin, which makes the hot wafers hard to lift intact.
- Yield and keepingThe yield depends entirely on thickness and cutter size; a batch this size rolled genuinely thin gives a great many small wafers. They stay crisp only in a truly airtight tin; humidity softens them within a day, and once softened they cannot be re-curled to any advantage.
Oscar Tschirky's book collects the working repertoire of a large American hotel kitchen at the end of the nineteenth century, and wafers of this kind belong with the petits fours and after-dinner sweets. The technique -- a thin batter or paste baked flat and curled hot around a spoon handle or a dowel -- is that of the French tuile and cigarette family, and the recipe's own use of a wooden spoon handle shows how the curl was got before shaped forms were to be had. That the chocolate is grated rather than melted reflects the period habit of reducing a hard cake of chocolate on a rasp, and the whisked whites, sugar and just enough flour show the same skeleton as a meringue batter, stiffened to the point where it can be rolled out and cut like a biscuit.