Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Graham Flour Wafers
Graham Flour Wafers
Take two breakfast cupfuls each of graham and wheat flour, put into a basin and rub one and a half teacupfuls of butter into it; when quite smooth, add a saltspoonful of salt and three-quarters of a breakfast cupful of sugar, stirring in gradually sufficient water to make a stiff dough. Sprinkle some flour over the table, place the dough on it, roll it out very thin, and then cut it into squares. Butter a baking-sheet, lay the squares of dough on it, and bake in a quick oven.
A short-dough cracker-cookie of the kind kept in tins for tea and invalid trays. The measurements are the main obstacle: three different sized cups appear in eight lines.
- Breakfast cup vs. teacupA breakfast cupful is usually reckoned at about a full 8 oz cup, a teacupful smaller, on the order of 6 oz, though neither was standardised. On that reading the dough is roughly 2 cups graham flour, 2 cups white flour, about 1 1/8 cups (2 1/4 sticks) butter and 3/4 cup sugar. A saltspoonful is generally taken as 1/4 teaspoon.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour milled with the bran and germ left in. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest thing; it is not the same as the sweetened, cinnamon-flavored graham cracker crumbs sold today.
- Water, added by feelNo quantity is given because the flour absorbs unpredictably and the butter already carries moisture. Start with 3 to 4 tablespoons and add a teaspoon at a time; the dough should just hold together, stiff enough to roll without slumping.
- "Very thin" is the hingeThese are wafers, not cookies. Roll to about 1/16 inch, thin enough to see the shadow of your hand through, or they bake up short and cakey rather than crisp. Rolling between sheets of parchment keeps the high-butter dough manageable.
- Quick oven, with a caveatA quick oven is usually reckoned at about 400-425F, and that is defensible for a lean cracker, but with 3/4 cup of sugar in the dough the edges will color before the centers set. 400F is safer, and check at 6 minutes; 8 to 10 is usually enough.
- Baking sheetGreasing the sheet was standard before parchment and non-stick surfaces. Parchment is better here, since the wafers are fragile and stick as the sugar caramelizes.
- Yield and keepingCool them completely on a rack, then store airtight; whole-wheat fat goes stale faster than white, so plan on a week at most.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and temperance lecturer whose 1830s campaign for coarse, unsifted, home-milled wheat flour was aimed squarely at the fashionable white bread of the day. By the time Oscar Tschirky was running the Waldorf's dining rooms at the turn of the century, the moral crusade had faded into a general association of graham flour with health, digestion and the sickroom, and hotel kitchens kept graham wafers, gems and bread on hand for guests who asked for plain food. What is striking about this particular formula is how far it drifts from Graham's austerity: a little over half a pound of butter and three-quarters of a cup of sugar to four cups of flour makes something closer to a rich sweet biscuit than to reform bread. The rolled-thin, cut-in-squares method is the standard nineteenth-century approach to any wafer or cracker, worked by hand long before docked, machine-cut crackers became the supermarket default.