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English Wafers for Tea or Dessert
Mix 1/2 pound of sifted flour, 1 ounce of butter, and 1 pinch of salt with sufficient milk to make a firm batter. Roll it very thin, as thin as paper,--cut into rounds, and bake in hot oven till crisp but not burned. They are better eaten fresh, but will keep in a tin box some days.
A plain flour-and-butter wafer, closer to a cracker than a cookie. The whole recipe hinges on rolling it thin enough.
- Weights in cupsHalf a pound of sifted flour is about 2 cups (225 g); 1 ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons. The milk is unmeasured — start with about 1/3 cup and add a spoonful at a time.
- "Firm batter" means doughOlder books use "batter" loosely. What you want here is a stiff, non-sticky dough that will take a rolling pin without tearing, roughly the consistency of pasta dough. If it slumps, it will not roll to paper thinness.
- Roll thinner than feels right"As thin as paper" is the instruction that matters. Anything much thicker than about 1/16 inch tends to bake to a hard biscuit rather than a crisp wafer. Rolling between sheets of parchment, or running the dough through a pasta machine and working down through the settings, gets there faster than a pin alone.
- Oven temperatureA "hot oven" in period cookery is usually taken as somewhere around 400–450°F. At that heat paper-thin rounds bake in only a few minutes and can go from pale to scorched very quickly, so watch them rather than trust a timer. 400°F gives a little more margin.
- Docking and blisteringPrick each round two or three times with a fork before baking. Undocked wafers puff into hollow domes, which is charming but breaks them in the tin.
- Rest before rollingTen minutes under a cloth relaxes the gluten and stops the rounds shrinking back as you cut them. The scraps can be re-rolled once without toughening.
- Yield and servingExpect several dozen wafers at about 2½ inches across. The title points to tea or dessert; wafers of this sort were also eaten with cheese or potted meat, and a pinch of extra salt or a little grated Parmesan in the dough suits that use.
- KeepingCool completely on a rack before the tin goes on the lid, or trapped steam softens them overnight. If they do go limp, three minutes in a 300°F oven crisps them again.
Wafers of this kind sit at the older end of English baking, descended from the batter cooked between long-handled irons in medieval and Tudor kitchens — the same tradition that gives us the communion wafer and the word itself, which is generally traced through Old French to a Germanic root meaning honeycomb, said by tradition to reflect the patterned irons. By the nineteenth century the wafer had relatives of several kinds, among them the sweet, curled dessert wafer served with ices and the thin, dry "water biscuit" eaten with cheese, which this version closely resembles. Its appearance in With a Saucepan Over the Sea reflects the book's premise of gathering national dishes from abroad for American cooks, and it is a fair choice for England — a recipe of four ingredients whose character comes entirely from technique rather than from anything in the larder.