No. 3362

Chocolate Waffles and Cigarette Waffles with Vanilla—Thin

Gaufres Minces au Chocolat et Gaufres Cigarettes a la Vanille

Lay six ounces of flour, four ounces of sugar, one ounce of vanilla sugar (No. 3165), and four ounces of powdered chocolate in a vessel; dilute with four egg-yolks, half a pint of double cream partly whipped and four egg-whites also partly whipped. Range this paste with a spoon on a waxed baking sheet into very thin round wafers two and a half inches in diameter and bake in a hot oven. As soon as done roll them on small wooden sticks half an inch in diameter.

Cigarette Wafers with Vanilla.—Dilute gradually six ounces of flour, an ounce and a half of sugar and half an ounce of vanilla sugar (No. 3165), with two and a half gills of milk and one egg; stir to have a smooth and flowing paste, then add an ounce of melted butter. Cook this preparation in round, flat wafer irons (Fig. 608), proceeding the same as for No. 3363. When of a fine golden color roll them on a small roller three-eighths of an inch in diameter.

← No. 3361 Parisian Tuiles Tea Cakes No. 3363 Wafers with Almonds or Hazel-Nuts and with B →

For the Modern Kitchen

Two thin wafer batters from Ranhofer's tea-cake chapter: one baked spread on a sheet, one cooked in a hinged wafer iron. Both are rolled around a stick while still hot, and that is where the whole thing is won or lost.

Roll them hot, in small batchesA baked wafer stays pliable for only a few seconds off the heat. Bake or iron four or five at a time so each can be lifted and wrapped around the dowel before it sets; a sheet that cools flat can be returned to the oven for a few seconds to soften again.
A hot ovenRanhofer gives no temperatures; for the chocolate wafers something in the 400-425F range is a reasonable modern reading. They are only a fraction of an inch thick and go from set to scorched quickly, so watch from about four minutes.
Gills and pintsA gill is half a cup, so two and a half gills of milk is 1 1/4 cups. Ranhofer's half pint of double cream is one cup; heavy cream is the practical modern substitute, though double cream runs richer (around 48 percent) than American heavy cream (36 percent and up).
Powdered chocolateThis most likely meant finely grated sweetened eating chocolate rather than unsweetened cocoa, though the recipe does not say. Four ounces of grated dark chocolate is probably the closer match; cocoa powder will make the batter drier and more bitter.
Vanilla sugarNo. 3165 is Ranhofer's own vanilla sugar, not reproduced here; the usual period method is sugar pounded with vanilla bean and sifted. A bean buried in a jar of sugar for a week does much the same job, or use the seeds of half a pod plus the equivalent weight of sugar.
Waxed baking sheetMost likely the sheet itself rubbed with wax to release the batter. Parchment or a silicone mat is the modern equivalent and releases the thin batter reliably.
Wafer ironsFig. 608 is a flat round iron of the pizzelle or krumkake type. A stovetop krumkake iron or an electric pizzelle press works; a modern deep-pocket Belgian waffle iron does not, as the batter must cook thin and flat to roll.
The rolling sticksHalf an inch for the chocolate wafers, three-eighths for the cigarettes. A wooden spoon handle, a chopstick or a metal cannoli tube all serve; lightly oil them the first time.
Yield and keepingNo yield is given; from this quantity of batter expect several dozen wafers at two and a half inches. They soften within hours in humid air, so store airtight or bake the same day they are served.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York across two stints totalling roughly thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially his working archive, over a thousand pages of it, written in the numbered cross-referenced style of a professional brigade. Gaufre is simply the French word for waffle or wafer, and the thin, crisp, rolled kind belongs to the same tradition as the medieval oublie and its patterned irons, which were made by specialist craftsmen well before batter irons reached domestic kitchens. Wafers of this rolled cylindrical shape are of a piece with the biscuit still sold as the cigarette russe; the name is generally traced to the shape rather than to any Russian origin, and in Ranhofer's dining room these would have gone out beside ices and creams, where a wafer's job was to give a spoonful of something cold a bit of crunch. That he offers a chocolate version at all reflects how far chocolate had moved by the 1890s from a drink to a confectioner's ingredient sold ready-ground.