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Dessert

Violet Wafers

A thin wafer flavored with lemon juice, powdered sugar, violet essence, and blue food coloring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Violet Wafers

Ingredients

Directions

Make the violet glaze

  1. Squeeze the juice from the lemons into a small pan.

  2. Add sifted powdered sugar until the mixture is as thick as lemon wafer batter.

  3. Stir in a strong essence of violets and a little blue food coloring for color.

  4. If the mixture is too thin, add more powdered sugar.

Spread

  1. Spread the mixture onto wafer paper like you would for lemon wafers.

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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Lemons
Provide the tart juice that gives the mixture its acidity and citrus flavor.
Powdered sugar
Thickens the lemon juice into a spreadable batter and adds sweetness.
Essence of violets
Supplies the floral aroma that defines this violet version of lemon wafers.

The step that matters

Adjusting the thickness with powdered sugar. Powdered sugar thickens the lemon juice as it dissolves and sets the spreading consistency. Adding too much at once can make the batter stiff and hard to spread, while too little leaves it runny and likely to spread past the wafer paper edges.

“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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