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Vanilla Flavored Wafers
These are made the same as wafers with pistachios, mixing half a stick of vanilla well pounded with the sugar, and half a glass of brandy in place of the orange-flower water.
A variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have already turned to the pistachio wafer formula and are only swapping the flavourings. Two of the three measurements need translating before you start.
- You need the base recipeNothing here works without the preceding entry for wafers with pistachios, which supplies the proportions; this page only tells you what to change. The text confirms the base includes sugar and orange-flower water. Read it first, then substitute the flavourings below.
- "Half a stick of vanilla"A stick is a whole vanilla bean, so this is half a pod. Split it, scrape the seeds, and pound pod and seeds together with the sugar in a mortar, then sift out the woody fibres. A food processor does the same job; the point is to distribute the seeds through the sugar rather than to add liquid extract.
- "Half a glass of brandy"A glass in nineteenth-century cookery usually means a wine glass, about 2 fluid ounces, which would make half a glass roughly 1 fluid ounce or 2 tablespoons. Add it last and judge the consistency; a thin batter spreads too far on the sheet.
- Orange-flower waterThe ingredient being replaced is orange blossom water, still sold in Middle Eastern and baking shops. It is a flavouring, not a leavener, so nothing structural changes when brandy stands in for it.
- Alcohol and flavourMost of the brandy's alcohol drives off in the oven; what remains is the underlying grape and oak character. Use something you would drink rather than cooking brandy, since there is little else in a wafer to hide behind.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction; you will have to take it from the base recipe or judge it yourself. Thin wafers of this type generally want a hot oven and a short bake. They colour at the edges first and go from pale to burnt quickly, so bake one tray at a time and watch them.
- Shaping while warmIf you want a curled or rolled shape, lift them from the sheet within seconds of leaving the oven and drape them over a rolling pin or dowel. Once cool they snap.
- YieldThe yield depends entirely on the quantities in the pistachio-wafer base and on how thinly you spread them. They keep about a week in an airtight tin and lose their snap in humid weather.
Oscar Tschirky was the maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf, not its chef, but his 1896 Cook Book collected the kitchen's working repertoire, with long chains of wafer and petit-four variations built by swapping one flavouring for another off a single base. Orange-flower water, the ingredient displaced here, was one of the standard nineteenth-century confectioner's perfumes, as ordinary then as vanilla extract is now, and brandy and pounded vanilla bean are offered as its replacements. Pounding the bean with sugar is often said to have been a common way to extract flavour before bottled extracts became reliable and cheap, and it survives in the vanilla sugar sold in European groceries.