[Sca-cooks] Wafer Iron

[Johnna Holloway]

The 16th century wafer batters that we have translated are very thin 
batters.
One recipe by a nun in a Perugian nunnery uses only water, flour, sugar 
and aniseed. Another uses water, aniseed, and flour. These recipes stick.
In fact the recipe notes that they stick. You have to keep greasing the 
irons when making the wafers.
(They stick even when using modern non-stick electric irons.)

Does your daughter have a gas stove? I would think that using these 
would take either a low gas burner
or maybe an outdoor fire that could be raked into embers. They did make 
them over small braziers.
Let me see. Oh I know -- check out http://www.historicfood.com/Wafer.htm 
for what Ivan Day has on wafers, inc. his irons.

The wafer irons that I saw in the museum in Santa Fe this summer were
much smaller than these. I think they came out of a nunnery too.

Johnnae


Elise Fleming wrote:
>
>
> Greetings! While visiting my daughter in San Francisco, I succumbed to 
> a wafer iron that we saw in a culinary antique store. You can see 
> photos at
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/8311418@N08/ 
> <http://www.flickr.com/photos/8311418@N08/> . I've got some questions, 
> though, especially for iron workers such as Phlip. While the store 
> says that they are old, is there any way to really tell based on the 
> construction? Also, I remember that the shop said the round part was 
> brass. Could it be bronze or is brass correct? And, given how shallow 
> the part that takes the batter, these would make very thin wafers, 
> right? Because if you added lots of batter, it would squoosh out the 
> sides and into the fire. Any comments about using this for real??
>
> Alys K.
>
> __._,_.___
>
>
> __,_._,___