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Dessert

Wafers

A light, thick batter is baked on heated wafer irons to produce thin wafers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Wafers

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the cream, powdered sugar, flour, orange water, and egg yolk to form a light thick batter.

Bake and roll

  1. Butter the wafer irons and heat them.

  2. Place a teaspoonful of batter onto the hot irons.

  3. Bake carefully and quickly roll the wafers off the iron using a stick.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Cream + flourtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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 that holds the thin wafer together once baked.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and helps bind the batter into a smooth, cohesive mixture.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the wafer and helps it brown lightly as it bakes.
Cream
Adds fat and moisture, giving the batter a tender, rich texture.

The step that matters

Bake carefully and quickly roll the wafers off the iron. The wafers are very thin and hot, so they set within seconds of coming off the iron. Rolling them while still warm and pliable prevents cracking, and waiting too long makes them brittle and hard to shape.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sugar, flour, egg. 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.

More wafers recipes

Walnut 51Almond 29Vanilla 24Nut 23Graham 21Geneva 20 See all 17 →

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