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Dessert

Walnut Wafers

A simple walnut wafer cookie made with brown sugar, eggs, nuts, flour, salt, baking powder, and bitter almond flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Walnut Wafers

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make and shape the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix together the brown sugar, eggs, finely broken nuts, flour, salt, and baking powder.

  2. Add bitter almond flavoring to taste.

  3. Drop the mixture in balls the size of hulled walnuts, 1 inch apart, onto a well-buttered baking sheet.

Bake

  1. Bake until golden, as you would for cookies.

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. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Nuts + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together394 recipes

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

  3. Nuts + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour 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

Eggs
Bind the mixture and help the wafers hold their shape while baking.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and caramel-like browning as the wafers bake.
Flour
Provides a small amount of structure so the balls set rather than spread into a thin mass.
Finely broken nuts
Add body, richness and nutty flavor to the batter.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking to lighten the wafers slightly.

The step that matters

Spacing the dough balls. The mixture spreads as it bakes and the sugar helps it caramelize, so balls placed too close can fuse together. Leaving 1 inch between them lets each wafer brown and set on its own.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Pistachiofits better
  2. Cashew nutfits better
  3. Macadamia nutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

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