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Dessert

Very Choice Wafers

Thin wafer-like cakes made from cream, flour, sugar, bitter almonds, and baked in wafer irons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Very Choice Wafers

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Stir the cream into the flour gradually until smooth.

  2. Beat in the sugar and pounded bitter almonds for flavor.

  3. If the batter is too thick, add a little more cream; it should be very thin.

Bake and roll

  1. Heat the wafer irons.

  2. Grease them with butter.

  3. Bake until light brown.

  4. Roll them immediately after removing from the irons.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  4. Almond + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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

Flour
Provides the structure that sets the thin batter into crisp wafers.
Cream
Supplies moisture and fat, giving the batter its thin, tender texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the wafers brown as they bake.
Bitter almonds
Contribute the characteristic aroma and flavor to the wafers.

The step that matters

Keeping the batter very thin. A thin batter spreads into a thin, crisp sheet on the hot iron. A thick batter bakes into a dense, heavy wafer that is hard to roll while warm.

“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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