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Dessert

Nut Wafers

Nut wafers are sweet, nutty cookies baked from a batter of eggs, sugar, flour, and nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Nut Wafers

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Beat the eggs thoroughly.

  2. Add the sugar, salt, flour, and nut meats to the eggs.

  3. If the mixture is not stiff enough to drop in a firm mass, add more flour.

Bake

  1. Drop small quantities onto well-buttered paper.

  2. Bake for about 5 minutes in a 400°F (200°C) oven.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  4. Meat + eggtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,432 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Meat + flourtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,529 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Eggs
Beaten eggs provide the structure and binding that hold the wafers together.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the wafers brown and crisp as they bake.
Flour
Thickens the batter so it holds its shape when dropped, and can be added to stiffen it.
Nut meats
Add texture and richness to the wafers.

The step that matters

Adjusting the flour for stiffness. If the batter is too loose it will spread flat on the paper instead of holding a firm mass. Adding flour in small amounts stiffens the mixture so the drops keep their shape while baking.

“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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