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Wafer Gingerbread
Pour seven fluid ounces of treacle into a basin and with a wooden spoon mix in two ounces each of warmed butter and moist sugar, half that quantity of ground ginger, and lastly eight ounces of sifted flour; stir well until quite smooth. Turn it onto a slightly greased baking-sheet, rolling it out very thin, put in a slow oven and bake. Take out and cut into squares while still hot, roll them into shapes, and let them get cold.
A British-style brandy-snap batter written in avoirdupois weights: thin, dark, and shaped while hot. Everything depends on the last thirty seconds.
- Shape it hot or not at allThe sheet turns brittle as it cools, and rolled shapes crack. Cut the squares the moment the pan leaves the oven, roll them around the greased handle of a wooden spoon a few at a time, and slide the pan back into the oven for half a minute whenever the rest stiffens.
- TreacleIn British usage this is dark treacle, the closest American equivalent being unsulphured molasses. Seven fluid ounces is a scant cup, about 200 ml. Golden syrup gives a paler, milder wafer and is also defensible.
- Moist sugarNineteenth-century "moist sugar" is unrefined soft sugar still carrying molasses. Light brown sugar is the direct substitute; two ounces is about a quarter cup packed.
- "Half that quantity" of gingerRead literally against the two ounces of butter and sugar, that is one ounce of ground ginger, roughly a quarter cup. That is a fierce, pepper-hot wafer by modern taste. Two to three teaspoons produces something most people will recognise as gingerbread; the ambiguity is in the original, not in the reading.
- FlourEight ounces of sifted flour is about two cups. Weigh it if you can, since sifted volume varies by a good deal and the batter's spread depends on it.
- Slow ovenSomewhere around 300F; the term is not precise, and 275-325F covers the usual modern reckoning. The wafers should dry and darken slightly rather than colour; treacle burns fast and a burnt one is bitter all the way through.
- Rolling it thinSpread the batter with an offset spatula rather than a rolling pin, or roll it between the greased sheet and a sheet of parchment. Aim for about 1/8 inch. Thicker and it will not curl.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; expect roughly two dozen wafers. They keep crisp for a few days in a tin and go soft immediately in humidity.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book was compiled at the Waldorf when the hotel kitchen still worked in a broadly Anglo-French idiom, and this entry reads as a British confectioner's formula: treacle, moist sugar and weights in ounces are not typical New York recipe vocabulary of the period. Thin treacle wafers rolled hot while pliable belong to the same family as the brandy snap and the rolled wafer, which was made on flat irons long before it was made on baking sheets, and the technique works because the sugar-and-syrup base sets glassy as it cools.