Home › Pastries › Chocolate Wafers
Chocolate Wafers
5 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 cupful sugar 2 cupfuls flour ¼ cake chocolate 2 eggs 1/4 teaspoonful baking soda ½ teaspoonful vanilla extract 1/4 teaspoonful salt Cream Crisco and sugar together, add chocolate melted, eggs well beaten, vanilla extract, flour, salt, and soda. Mix and turn out on to floured baking board. Roll out thin, and cut with small cutter. Lay on Criscoed tin and bake from seven to ten minutes in moderate oven. Sufficient for forty-six wafers. 1 yeast cake
A plain rolled chocolate cookie from Procter & Gamble's Crisco promotional book, built to show that shortening creams as well as butter. The dough is stiff and sweet, and the whole success of it lies in rolling thin and pulling the pan early.
- Roll thin, watch the clockThese are wafers, not cookies: roll to about 1/8 inch. At seven to ten minutes a thin chocolate dough goes from set to scorched with almost no warning, and the dark colour hides the browning. Judge by firm edges and a dry surface, and take them off the sheet to cool or they keep baking.
- "Moderate oven"Roughly 350-375F; 350F is the safer choice here. If the sheets are very thin, 350F on the middle rack with a second pan slid underneath will protect the bottoms.
- The chocolate quantityThe printed page gives a quarter cake of chocolate, as our text now reads. A cake of unsweetened chocolate in this period was typically a half-pound block scored into one-ounce squares, so a quarter cake is about 2 oz. Use 2 oz (2 squares) unsweetened chocolate, melted and cooled slightly.
- CriscoModern Crisco or any solid vegetable shortening works directly. Five tablespoons is a scant third of a cup. Butter can be substituted at the same volume for better flavour, though the dough will be slightly softer and will want chilling before rolling.
- "Criscoed tin"A greased baking sheet. Parchment is easier and prevents the sugar-heavy edges from sticking as they cool.
- Handling the doughChill the dough at least half an hour before rolling. Flour the board lightly only — excess flour worked into scraps makes the second and third rollings dry and chalky.
- YieldForty-six wafers assumes a small cutter, roughly 1 1/2 to 2 inches. A larger cutter will give you half that number and they will need a minute or two more.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was a cookbook written to sell a product: Procter & Gamble had introduced hydrogenated cottonseed oil in 1911 and needed to persuade cooks that a white, odourless, shelf-stable fat could replace butter and lard in everything they already made. The recipes are therefore deliberately ordinary — chocolate wafers, pie crust, doughnuts — with Crisco quietly inserted where the older book would have said butter. The wafer itself belongs to a long American line of thin rolled cookies cut with a small tin cutter, the kind kept in a jar. Chocolate reckoned by the "cake" is a good marker of the date: unsweetened chocolate was sold in scored blocks rather than by the ounce, and recipes assumed the reader knew which block she had.