Skip to main content
Dessert

Geneva Wafers

Thin, crisp pastry squares made from eggs, butter, flour, and sugar, filled with preserve and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Geneva Wafers

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a cool oven”. The 300°F in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the batter

  1. Whisk the eggs in a basin.

  2. Beat the butter until creamy and stir it into the eggs.

  3. Gradually add the flour and sifted sugar, mixing well.

Bake and shape

  1. Butter a baking sheet and drop a teaspoonful of the mixture onto it, leaving space between each.

  2. Bake in a cool oven (300°F / 150°C).

  3. When half done, roll the pieces up like wafers and insert a small wedge of bread or piece of wood to maintain their shape.

  4. Return to the oven until crisp.

Fill and serve

  1. Before serving, remove the bread and fill the widest end with a spoonful of preserve and whipped cream.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 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

Eggs
Provide structure and lift to the thin batter, helping it set as it bakes.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness, and helps the wafers crisp and brown.
Flour
Gives the batter structure so the wafers hold their shape when baked.
Sifted sugar
Adds sweetness and promotes browning as the wafers bake.

The step that matters

Return to the oven until crisp. Wafers become crisp only as their moisture evaporates during baking. Rolled too late or removed too early, they stay soft and bend, so check them until they feel firm.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes