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Wafers
Cream one-quarter cupful of butter, two cupfuls of boiling water, three-quarters cupful of sugar, one egg well beaten, one-half cupful of pastry flour, and a few drops of vanilla or to taste. Spread thin on bottom of a buttered inverted dripping pan and bake in a slow oven until delicately browned. Remove from pan and cut in oblong pieces while hot.
A thin batter baked flat on the back of a pan and cut into strips while still pliable — closer to a tuile than to what we now call a wafer. One measurement in the original looks corrupt, so read the notes before mixing.
- The water is almost certainly a misprintTwo cupfuls of boiling water against half a cupful of flour would give a liquid you could drink, not a batter that spreads. A tablespoon-scale quantity is the plausible reading; the printed figure cannot be taken at face value.
- Creaming with boiling waterWhatever the quantity, boiling liquid poured into creamed butter will melt it and break the emulsion. Cream the butter and sugar first, beat in the egg, then add the flour and only a little hot liquid at the end to loosen the batter to a spreadable paste.
- A slow ovenReckoned at roughly 275-325°F. These are thin enough to colour fast, so the low heat is doing real work; it dries the sheet through before the edges scorch. Start checking early.
- Pastry flourSoft wheat flour, roughly 8-9% protein. All-purpose works if you replace about two tablespoons per cup with cornstarch; straight bread flour will make the wafers tough and leathery rather than crisp.
- The inverted dripping panA dripping pan is the shallow rectangular roasting pan that sat under a joint. Turning it upside down gives a flat unrimmed surface with no sides to trap steam or block a spatula. A modern heavy baking sheet turned over, or a sheet lined with parchment, does the same job.
- Spread thin means thinAn offset spatula and about 1/16 inch. Anywhere the batter pools it will stay soft in the middle while the rest browns.
- Cut while hot — the hingeThe sheet is flexible for perhaps thirty seconds out of the oven and then sets brittle. Score and lift the pieces immediately; if they harden first, return the pan to the oven for a few seconds to soften them again.
- YieldAbout two dozen oblongs from a half-sheet-sized area. They soften in humid air, so store airtight the same day and re-crisp briefly in a low oven if needed.
Wafers of this kind belong to the "dainty dishes" end of the turn-of-the-century American cookbook — the chapter of small sweets meant for afternoon tea, card parties and the accompaniment of ices, where a plain cookie would have looked heavy. The batter is often said to be close kin to the mixtures European kitchens baked between hinged wafer irons, and a version of it turns up under names like almond wafer, lace cookie and, once rolled around a spoon handle, cigarettes russes. The instruction to bake on an inverted dripping pan is a reminder of how kitchen equipment was improvised: cooks turned over the pan they already owned.