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Dessert

Sweet Wafers

Sweet wafers are thin, crisp cookies made from a dough of sugar, butter, milk, and flour, flavored with lemon, nutmeg, ginger, or caraway seed.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Sweet Wafers

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. Cream together the sugar and butter or lard.

  2. Add the milk, cream of tartar, baking soda, and salt; mix well.

  3. If desired, add eggs and your choice of flavoring.

  4. Gradually add flour until the dough is workable.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough and cut into desired shapes.

  2. Sprinkle with sugar just before baking.

  3. Bake in a quick oven at 400°F (200°C) until golden.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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 or lard
Adds fat that tenderises the wafers and helps them brown.
Cream of tartar
Acidic component that reacts with baking soda to help the wafers rise and stay light.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the dough to produce gas for lift and browning.
Eggs
Add structure and richness to the dough, binding it as it bakes.

The step that matters

Sprinkle with sugar just before baking. Sugar sprinkled on the surface caramelises in the oven, giving a crisp, golden top. Adding it too early can draw out moisture and make the surface soggy before baking.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, milk, cream, egg, 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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