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Gaufres
Gaufres are made everywhere on holidays, sold hot on the streets in France. They are a very delicate sort of wafer, rich but crisp. Mix 1 pound of pastry flour with 6 eggs, add 1 pound fresh butter, melted till soft, 1 spoonful of yeast, and 1 pint of cream or rich milk. Beat all well and long. Set aside in a cold place 2 hours, pour into gaufre irons and serve hot, with sugar. Gaufre irons can be bought at the French hardware stores.
A rich yeasted wafer batter of the old French street type. The proportions are enormous by modern standards and the instructions assume hinged irons heated over coals, so a little translation is needed.
- The hinge: thin batter, hot ironGaufres are meant to be crisp wafers, not fluffy waffles. The batter should pour and spread thinly; if it mounds, loosen it with a little more milk, and let the iron come fully up to heat before the first one goes in.
- A pound of flour, a pound of butterThat is roughly 4 cups of pastry flour and 2 cups (four sticks) of butter, with a pint of cream and 6 eggs. Weigh the flour if you can, since scooped flour varies a good deal. The equal weights of flour and butter are what the recipe asks for, and the richness is presumably what lies behind the author's "rich but crisp."
- "1 spoonful of yeast"Genuinely ambiguous. At the time this book was published this most likely meant a spoonful of liquid barm or crumbled compressed fresh yeast, not modern dried granules; a small cake of fresh yeast, or a couple of teaspoons of instant, is the nearest equivalent. Whatever the intended dose, the two-hour cold rest suggests it is there to flavour and lighten slightly rather than to raise a dough.
- Resting in a cold placeTwo hours in a cool larder gives a slow, faint fermentation and lets the flour hydrate so the batter flows evenly. In a modern refrigerator the butter will firm up; let the batter stand at room temperature for 20 minutes and stir it smooth before cooking.
- Gaufre ironsThe original irons were long-handled hinged plates held over a fire and turned by hand. An electric waffle iron works, preferably a thin-plate or pizzelle model rather than a deep Belgian one; with this much butter in the batter the plates need no greasing.
- Yield and servingThe full quantity makes something like two dozen wafers -- worth halving or quartering for a household. Dust with sugar while hot and eat within a few minutes; they crisp as they cool and go leathery if stacked and covered.
Gaufre is simply the French for waffle, the French word generally traced to a Frankish root often said to mean honeycomb, after the pattern the irons press into the batter -- though a link to "weave" has also been proposed. Hinged wafer irons go back to the medieval oublie, baked by guild wafer-makers and sold outside churches on feast days, and gaufres remained tied to holidays and fairs into the twentieth century -- the recipe itself notes that they were sold hot on the streets. The instruction to buy the irons "at the French hardware stores" places the recipe squarely in its genre: With a Saucepan Over the Sea collected European dishes for American cooks, and assumed a reader in a city with immigrant shops where such specialist ironmongery could be had.