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Dessert

Tea Lemon Wafers

A sweet wafer flavored with lemon and tea, made from butter, sugar, eggs, lemon juice, rind, nutmeg, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Tea Lemon Wafers

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and powdered sugar together.

  2. Beat the eggs until creamy.

  3. Mix the beaten eggs with the butter and sugar.

  4. Add the lemon juice, lemon rind, nutmeg, and enough flour to form a stiff batter.

  5. Beat the mixture until smooth and light.

Bake the wafers

  1. Heat the wafer irons over a clear fire.

  2. Lightly grease the irons with butter.

  3. Fill the irons with batter.

  4. Close the irons.

  5. Turn over the fire until the batter is brown.

  6. Remove the wafers.

Finish and shape

  1. Dust the wafers with powdered sugar.

  2. Roll the wafers around a smooth stick.

  3. Carefully remove the wafers when cold.

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 + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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
Creams with sugar to give the batter richness and a tender, fine texture.
Eggs
Add structure and lift when beaten, helping the thin batter set as it cooks.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the batter and dissolves easily into the creamed butter.
Flour
Gives the batter enough body to hold its shape while it sets in the iron.
Lemon rind
Adds aromatic oils that give the wafers a bright lemon flavour.

The step that matters

Turn over the fire until the batter is brown. Wafers bake quickly between hot irons. Too little heat leaves them pale and soft, while too much browns the sugar and butter before the batter sets, causing burning.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, egg, nutmeg, flour):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, nutmeg, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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