SC - Quick and Dirty Wafer Redaction

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Hullo, the list!

I don’t recall if this has been worked on or commented on by anybody on
the list, but I had occasion to make some wafers for an event I’m going
to Saturday, and I figured an account of the proceedings might be
helpful to someone.

>From Gervase Markham’s “The English Hus-Wife”, 1615, Michael Best
edition, ©1986 McGill-Queens University Press, Kingston and Montreal:

“To make wafers

	To make the best wafers, take the finest wheat flour you can get, and
mix it with cream, the yolks of eggs, rose-water, sugar, and cinnamon
till it be a little thicker than pancake batter; and then, warming your
wafer irons on a charcoal fire, anoint them first with sweet butter, and
then lay your batter and press it, and bake it white or brown at your pleasure.”

After consulting a few Italian pizzelle recipes for some basic
proportions, I ended up with the following:

3 cups (~450 grams plain) all-purpose flour
1 U.S. pint (~500 grams) heavy cream
6 large egg yolks, beaten 
1/4 - 1/2 cup (60 - 120 grams) rosewater
1 cup (~250 grams) sugar
1/8 teaspoon (~1 ml) ground cinnamon
pinch salt

Sift the flour, cinnamon, and the salt together, set aside. Beat the egg
yolks and sugar together until light and bright yellow. Add the cream
and 1/4 cup (60 grams) rosewater, mix thoroughly. Fold the dry
ingredients into the liquid. If the batter is too thick, you can thin it
with more rosewater until it is clearly a soft batter but too thick to
easily pour: your basic American “cream” cake batter.

Heat a pizzelle or other wafer iron for two or three minutes; if it’s
the kind that you sit on a stove burner, heat each side for two minutes.
Brush a little melted butter on the inside of the irons, and spoon an
appropriate amount of batter into the irons. You’ll need to experiment
to get the exact amount and placement right. My old-fashioned 5-inch
pizzelle iron uses a heaping teaspoon of batter (roughly a level
dessertspoon for those that use such measures). Bake till golden, and be
aware that the wafers will continue to brown a bit after they come out
of the irons. Cool on a cake rack until crispy or roll into tubes or
cones while hot and flexible. Makes about three dozen, depending on the
size of the iron, and the obvious necessity to hide several that are
unevenly browned by immediately eating them. You have your reputation to
consider, after all.

Historically, most of the wafers eaten in period Europe appear not to
have been very sweet, but I’ve used a fair amount of sugar both to
appease the tastes of those who will look at a wafer and see a cookie,
and to achieve a crisp but tender, sort of brittle, product.
Un-or-barely-sweetened wafers, such as the cheese wafers mentioned in Le
Menagier de Paris, should probably be made with a much softer flour than
AP, probably some kind of pastry flour would be the way to get them
decently crisp without a lot of sugar. AP tends to be slightly glutinous
in this wafer when unsweetened, especially when using dilute or
secondary shortening sources like egg yolks and cream. Of course, we
can’t really be sure how crispy wafers were supposed to get in period, either.

If you manage to bring leftovers home from events, they make excellent
ice cream sandwiches... .

Enjoy, all!

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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