Skip to main content
Dessert

Nut Wafers

A sweet wafer made with butter, sugar, eggs, flour, and pecans, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Vanilla and pecans are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,691 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Nut 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.

Make the dough

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together until smooth.

  2. Mix in the beaten eggs, baking soda dissolved in cold water, and vanilla extract.

  3. Add enough flour to form a dough that can be rolled thin.

  4. Roll out the dough and cut into desired shapes.

Top and bake

  1. Place the cut wafers on a baking pan.

  2. Beat the egg whites and mix in 2 tablespoons of sugar.

  3. Brush the tops of the wafers with the egg white mixture.

  4. Sprinkle chopped pecans on top of each wafer.

  5. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

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. Vanilla + pecanstop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,691 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  3. Butter + pecanstop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,416 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Vanilla + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,241 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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 dough and add richness, and the whites give the topping a glossy coat.
Butter
Provides fat that makes the wafers tender and rich.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the wafers brown as they bake.
Flour
Forms the structure that lets the dough be rolled thin and hold its cut shapes.
Baking soda
Reacts to lighten the dough and encourages browning in the oven.

The step that matters

Bake until golden. Butter and sugar brown quickly, and no baking time is given, so the wafers can scorch if left too long. Watch the color rather than the clock.

Swap the pecans

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Macadamia nutfits better
  4. Pecansthe original

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

You might also like

Vanilla Ice CreamVanilla Ice Cream108 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes