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Dessert

Plain Wafers

Plain wafers are thin, crisp biscuits made from a batter of butter, flour, salt, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Plain Wafers

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Melt the butter and mix it with the salt.

  2. Gradually add the flour, mixing until combined.

  3. Add water to create a very thin batter.

Bake and serve

  1. Preheat the wafer irons and pour in the batter.

  2. Bake until golden and crisp.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and fat, which helps the wafers brown and taste savoury.
All-purpose flour
Provides the starch and gluten that give the wafers their structure as they set.

The step that matters

Add water to create a very thin batter. A batter that is too thick will not spread into a thin sheet in the iron, so the wafers may be cakey rather than crisp. Water thins the batter so it cooks evenly and crisps.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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