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Dessert

Butter Wafers.— Gen Ff Res Cm Beurre

Butter wafers are thin sweet pastries made from sugar, flour, butter, water, orange flower water, and lemon zest.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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.— Gen Ff Res Cm Beurre

Oven, in the book's wordsA very slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the paste

  1. Combine sugar, flour, orange flower water, and lemon zest in a bowl.

  2. Melt butter in water and mix into the dry ingredients to form a thin paste.

Cook the wafers

  1. Heat the irons on both sides.

  2. Lightly butter the heated irons.

  3. Place a spoonful of paste in the iron.

  4. Cook the paste by turning it on both sides until golden.

  5. Remove the wafer and roll it until it holds its shape.

  6. Continue with the remaining paste.

Finish

  1. Dry the finished wafers in the stove.

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
Adds fat and richness, and helps the wafers brown and turn crisp.
Flour
Provides structure, setting into a thin, sturdy wafer as it cooks.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the wafers caramelise to a golden colour.

The step that matters

Cook the paste by turning it on both sides until golden. The paste is thin, so it can burn quickly if the iron is too hot or left too long. Turning it evenly on both sides cooks it through and browns it evenly. Shape is set while it is still warm and pliable, so the wafer is rolled soon after removal.

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.

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