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Dessert

Brandy Wafers

A sweet wafer made from treacle, butter, flour, sugar, and ginger, baked until crisp.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Brandy Wafers

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Melt the butter and treacle together.

  2. Gradually stir in the flour, sugar, and ginger until well mixed.

Bake

  1. Grease a baking tin and drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto it, leaving space between each.

  2. Bake for 15 minutes.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Treacle
Adds deep sweetness, colour and moisture to the batter.
Butter
Melts to give fat that helps the wafers spread and turn crisp.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the spread batter together as it sets.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the wafers brown and crisp in the oven.
Ground ginger
Adds the warm, spicy aroma that defines the wafer's flavour.

The step that matters

Leave space between the spoonfuls. The batter is very fluid and spreads widely as it bakes, so spooning it far apart keeps the wafers from fusing into one sheet and lets each one crisp evenly.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Jalapenofits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

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