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Prep Time: 0 Minutes Cook Time: 3 Minutes |
Ready In: 3 Minutes Servings: 20 |
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From Gervase Markham's The English Hus-Wife , 1615, Michael Best edition, (c)1986 McGill-Queens University Press, Kingston and Montreal: 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. Read more . This would be lovely as a savory wafer as well, omitting ths sugar, cinnamon and rosewater, and adding herbs of your choice. Ingredients:
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 |
Directions:
1. Sift the flour, cinnamon, and the salt together, set aside.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Brush a little melted butter on the inside of the irons or use a non-stick cooking spray, and spoon an appropriate amount of batter onto the irons.
5. You'll need to experiment to get the exact amount and placement right.
6. My electric non-stick 4-inch pizzelle iron uses a heaping teaspoon of batter (roughly a level dessertspoon for those that use such measures).
7. Bake til golden, and be aware that the wafers will continue to brown a bit after they come out of the irons.
8. Cool on a cake rack until crispy or roll into tubes or cones while hot and flexible.
9. 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.
10. Historically, most of the wafers eaten in medieval 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.
11. 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 All-Pupose; 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 the middle ages, either.
12. If you have leftovers , they make excellent ice cream sandwiches... .
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