Skip to main content
Dessert

Butter Wafers. Gauffres an Beurre.

Thin sweet wafers made with sugar, flour, orange‑flower water, lemon zest, butter, and water, cooked in a waffle iron and dried.

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

Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Butter Wafers. Gauffres an Beurre.

Oven, in the book's wordsA very slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Combine sugar and flour in a bowl.

  2. Add orange-flower water and lemon zest.

  3. Melt butter in water. Mix the melted butter and water into the dry ingredients to form a thin paste.

Cook the wafers

  1. Heat the waffle irons on both sides. Lightly butter the heated waffle irons.

  2. Pour a spoonful of paste into the iron. Cook until golden brown, turning to cook both sides.

  3. Remove the wafer and roll it into shape. Repeat with remaining paste.

  4. Place finished wafers in a warm oven to dry until ready to serve.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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
Melts into the paste and adds richness and a crisp, golden finish on the irons.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the thin paste together as the wafers set.
Sugar
Sweetens the wafers and helps them brown to a golden colour as they cook.

The step that matters

Cook until golden brown, turning to cook both sides. The paste is thin and sugary, so it can scorch quickly on hot irons. Cooking both sides evenly sets the wafer through and browns it without burning, and the wafer must still be pliable enough to roll while warm.

Swap the orange

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, lemon, butter. 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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipes