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Lemon Wafers
2 eggs. 2 cupfuls sugar. 2 cupfuls Crisco. 2 cupfuls milk. 5 cents baker's ammonia. 5 cents baker's ammonia 5 cents oil of lemon Flour to make stiff dough 2 teaspoonfuls salt Cover ammonia with milk and let soak over night. Next morning add sugar, Crisco, salt, eggs well beaten, lemon and enough flour to make a stiff dough. Roll very thin, cut in squares or diamonds, lay on Criscoed tins and bake from five to seven minutes in hot oven. Sufficient for one hundred and eighty-six wafers.
Breads, etc.
A commercial-scale cookie from the Crisco pamphlet, and the printed ingredient list is plainly incomplete — sugar, shortening and eggs are all called for in the method but never quantified. Read it as a record of a technique rather than a formula you can follow line by line.
- Missing quantitiesThe method calls for sugar, Crisco and beaten eggs, but the list above gives none of them. Those amounts cannot be recovered from the text; anyone baking this is working from a modern thin lemon wafer recipe with the ammonia method borrowed.
- "5 cents" as a measureRecipes of this period sometimes priced small quantities of drug-counter goods rather than measuring them. What five cents bought of baker's ammonia or of oil of lemon is not recoverable from the text, and neither converts reliably.
- Baker's ammoniaAmmonium carbonate or bicarbonate, also sold as hartshorn. It is still made for bakers and is a genuine leavener, not a household cleaner — the two are unrelated products despite the shared word.
- The hinge: roll them thinAmmonia leavening works only in thin, dry, quickly baked goods, where the gas and its smell escape completely. In anything thick or soft the residue stays behind and the cookie tastes sharply of ammonia. "Roll very thin" is the instruction that makes or breaks this.
- Soaking overnightLump baker's ammonia dissolves slowly, and undissolved grains leave bitter spots. The overnight milk soak does that work; modern powdered baker's ammonia dissolves in minutes.
- Oil of lemonThis is the essential oil, several times stronger than modern lemon extract. Even at this scale it would be measured in fractions of a teaspoon rather than tablespoons.
- "Hot oven"Roughly 400–450°F; the pamphlet gives no figure and period definitions vary. Five to seven minutes at that heat suits a wafer rolled paper-thin, and they go from pale to burnt very quickly at the end.
- Crisco and "Criscoed tins"Any solid vegetable shortening stands in directly. "Criscoed" simply means greased — the pamphlet uses the brand as a verb throughout.
- YieldThe recipe claims one hundred and eighty-six wafers, a very large batch by home standards, though the wafers are small. The proportions would need dividing several times over for a modern kitchen.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco itself went on sale, with recipes credited to Marion Harris Neil; every dish in it exists to show that the new hydrogenated vegetable shortening could replace lard and butter anywhere. What makes this particular page interesting is how old the rest of it is. Baker's ammonia — made from deer antler and later manufactured as ammonium carbonate — is generally said to have been the leavener of choice for crisp thin cookies for a long stretch before chemical baking powders arrived, and it survived in wafer and springerle recipes long after soda took over elsewhere because nothing else gives quite the same dry snap. Pricing ingredients in cents rather than spoonfuls seems to have been common enough in this era, when ammonia and oil of lemon came from the druggist rather than the grocer, and it is one of the reasons so many recipes of the period are now impossible to reproduce exactly.