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Dessert

Wafer Biscuits

A simple biscuit made from butter, sugar, water, flour, and salt, baked until lightly colored.

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 ↓

Wafer Biscuits

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, combine butter, salt, and sugar.

  2. Pour boiling water over the mixture and stir well.

  3. Add flour to form a hard dough.

  4. Knead the dough with a rolling pin until smooth.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll it very thin and cut into desired shapes.

  2. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until lightly colored.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. 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

Flour
Provides the structure, and kneading develops gluten for a firm, crisp biscuit.
Butter
Adds fat that shortens the dough, keeping the biscuits tender and rich.
Boiling water
Hydrates the flour so the dough binds together and firms up as it cools.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the biscuits brown lightly in the oven.

The step that matters

Roll it very thin and cut into desired shapes.. Thin dough dries out quickly in the oven and turns crisp. Thick dough stays doughy in the centre and may not bake through evenly.

“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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