wafers-msg – 9/4/11

Period wafers. Waffles. Wafer recipes and directions. wafer irons.

NOTE: See also the files: bread-msg, breadmaking-msg, desserts-msg, pancakes-msg, utensils-msg, cookies-msg, flour-msg.

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This file is part of a collection of files called Stefan's Florilegium. These files are available on the Internet at: http://www.florilegium.org

I have done a limited amount of editing. Messages having to do with separate topics were sometimes split into different files and sometimes extraneous information was removed. For instance, the message IDs were removed to save space and remove clutter.

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    Mark S. Harris                  AKA:  THLord Stefan li Rous
                                          Stefan at florilegium.org
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Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 11:52:14 -0800
From: david friedman <ddfr at best.com>
Subject: Re: Wafer recipe (WAS: Re:  Re: SC - Weekend Tart  Review and
Cookie request!

Chimene asked about wafer recipes.  Here is what the Menagier de Paris has
to say about wafers or waffles (the word could be translated either way):

"Waffles are made in four ways. In the first, beat eggs in a bowl, then
salt and wine, and add flour, and moisten the one with the other, and then
put in two irons little by little, each time using as much batter as a
slice of cheese is wide, and clap between two irons, and cook one side and
then the other; and if the iron does not easily release the batter, anoint
with a little cloth soaked in oil or fat. - The second way is like the
first, but add cheese, that is, spread the batter as though making a tart
or pie, then put slices of cheese in the middle, and cover the edges (with
batter: JH); thus the cheese stays within the batter and thus you put it
between two irons. - The third method, is for dropped waffles, called
dropped only because the batter is thinner like clear soup, made as above;
and throw in with it fine cheese grated; and mix it all together. - The
fourth method is with flour mixed with water, salt and wine, without eggs
or cheese.

"Item, waffles can be used when one speaks of the "large sticks" which are
made of flour mixed with eggs and powdered ginger beaten together, and made
as big as and shaped like sausages; cook between two irons."

This is the Janet Hinson translation.

Elizabeth/Betty Cook


Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 17:29:23 -0500
From: renfrow at skylands.net (Cindy Renfrow)
Subject: Re: SC - Waffres ala Master Huen

<snip>
>I bow to your expertise, M'Lady.
>However, putting the stomach of a luce, or of a pike into such a delicate
>recipe makes no sense.  It would add a strong fishy taste, and very little 
>else.
>Would it be entirely off base to think that perhaps, since this is a fish day
>recipe, in an effort to add the character of fowl eggs, which were forbidden,
>the cook chose to use fish eggs?
>
>Mordonna

Um, the recipe *does* call for hen's eggs, unless luce eggs are big enough
to crack & separate?:

Harleian MS. 279 - Leche Vyaundez

xxiiij.   Waffres.  Take [th]e Wombe of A luce, & se[th]e here wyl, & do it
on a morter, & tender chese [th]er-to, grynde hem y-fere; [th]an take
flowre an whyte of Eyroun & bete to-gedere, [th]en take Sugre an pouder of
Gyngere, & do al to-gederys, & loke [th]at [th]in Eyroun ben hote, & ley
[th]er-on of [th]in paste, & [th]an make [th]in waffrys, & serue yn.

24.  Wafers.  Take the Stomach of A pike, & seethe her well, & put it in a
mortar, & tender cheese thereto, grind them together; then take flour and
white of Eggs & beat together, then take Sugar and powder of Ginger, & put
all together, & look that thine Eggs are hot, & lay thereon of thine paste,
& then make thine wafers, & serve in.

I find the method somewhat confusing, unless we're being instructed to make
2 mixtures, i.e., a thick one with the fish & cheese, & another mixture
with flour, eggwhite, sugar & ginger.  Le Menagier (Goodman, p. 306) gives
instructions for cheese wafers that don't leak, in which the paste is
spread out, filled with strips of cheese, & then the ends of the paste are
folded into the middle, & the whole thing transferred to the waffle iron &
cooked.  I think that's what is happening here.

(<SHRIEK!>  Pocket sandwiches are period!  ;D <laughing>)

Stirring up trouble,

Cindy Renfrow/Sincgiefu
renfrow at skylands.net


Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 02:01:53 -0500
From: Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
Subject: SC - Quick and Dirty Wafer Redaction

I don’t recall if this has been worked on or commented on by anybody on
the list, but I had occasion to make some wafers for an event I’m going
to Saturday, and I figured an account of the proceedings might be
helpful to someone.

From Gervase Markham’s "The English Hus-Wife", 1615, Michael Best
edition, ©1986 McGill-Queens University Press, Kingston and Montreal:

"To make wafers

        To make the best wafers, take the finest wheat flour you can get, and
mix it with cream, the yolks of eggs, rose-water, sugar, and cinnamon
till it be a little thicker than pancake batter; and then, warming your
wafer irons on a charcoal fire, anoint them first with sweet butter, and
then lay your batter and press it, and bake it white or brown at your pleasure."

After consulting a few Italian pizzelle recipes for some basic
proportions, I ended up with the following:

3 cups (~450 grams plain) all-purpose flour
1 U.S. pint (~500 grams) heavy cream
6 large egg yolks, beaten
1/4 - 1/2 cup (60 - 120 grams) rosewater
1 cup (~250 grams) sugar
1/8 teaspoon (~1 ml) ground cinnamon
pinch salt

Sift the flour, cinnamon, and the salt together, set aside. Beat the egg
yolks and sugar together until light and bright yellow. Add the cream
and 1/4 cup (60 grams) rosewater, mix thoroughly. Fold the dry
ingredients into the liquid. If the batter is too thick, you can thin it
with more rosewater until it is clearly a soft batter but too thick to
easily pour: your basic American "cream" cake batter.

Heat a pizzelle or other wafer iron for two or three minutes; if it’s
the kind that you sit on a stove burner, heat each side for two minutes.
Brush a little melted butter on the inside of the irons, and spoon an
appropriate amount of batter into the irons. You’ll need to experiment
to get the exact amount and placement right. My old-fashioned 5-inch
pizzelle iron uses a heaping teaspoon of batter (roughly a level
dessertspoon for those that use such measures). Bake till golden, and be
aware that the wafers will continue to brown a bit after they come out
of the irons. Cool on a cake rack until crispy or roll into tubes or
cones while hot and flexible. Makes about three dozen, depending on the
size of the iron, and the obvious necessity to hide several that are
unevenly browned by immediately eating them. You have your reputation to
consider, after all.

Historically, most of the wafers eaten in period Europe appear not to
have been very sweet, but I’ve used a fair amount of sugar both to
appease the tastes of those who will look at a wafer and see a cookie,
and to achieve a crisp but tender, sort of brittle, product.
Un-or-barely-sweetened wafers, such as the cheese wafers mentioned in Le
Menagier de Paris, should probably be made with a much softer flour than
AP, probably some kind of pastry flour would be the way to get them
decently crisp without a lot of sugar. AP tends to be slightly glutinous
in this wafer when unsweetened, especially when using dilute or
secondary shortening sources like egg yolks and cream. Of course, we
can’t really be sure how crispy wafers were supposed to get in period, either.

If you manage to bring leftovers home from events, they make excellent
ice cream sandwiches... .

Adamantius


Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 20:52:39 EST
From: Aelfwyn at aol.com
Subject: SC - Wafers/Oblaten

Just a couple of additional mail order sources I spotted this week for those
curious;

King Arthur Flour carries "Baking Wafers" in 2 sizes and offers free shipping
on them. It mentions that they "are designed to cradle certain German cookies
as they bake on a baking sheet; they're a kind of edible parchment."
1-800-827-6836 or www.kingarthurflour.com

The Stash Tea Spring catalog offers "Dessert Wafers" "Faithfully baked
following a 200 year old European recipe, these delicate crisp wafers are made
of pounded almonds, sweet butter, pure cane sugar and rare bourbon vanilla
beans." The most interesting part is the tin these come in that says "The
Original Carlsbad Oblaten" on the outside! 1-800-826-4218  or
www.stashtea.com

The catalog queen; Aelfwyn


Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1999 16:57:01 -0600 (CST)
From: alysk at ix.netcom.com (Elise Fleming)
Subject: SC - German Oblaten

Greetings!  The term probably _does_ refer to communion-type wafers
since they are still commercially available.  The German import house
here in Cleveland had at least three different sizes a number of years
ago which I used for the base of my small marchpanes.  The modern
oblaten are very white and papery, which reminds many of us of the
communion wafers that melt in the mouth, or that "papery" substance
used on Italian nougats.  How papery the German wafers would have been
in the 1500s and 1600s, I don't know.

English marchpanes call for the marzipan to be laid on "wafers".  IIRC,
at least one recipe calls for layering the wafers to increase the
dimension of the marchpane.  Some English recipes for marchpanes
indicate that their thickness is about "two fingers", again IIRC.

Alys Katharine


Date: Thu, 13 May 1999 12:33:30 -0700
From: david friedman <ddfr at best.com>
Subject: Re: SC - Recipies

At 11:06 AM -0700 5/13/99, Nancy Santella wrote:
...
>Crisps
>From  the mother of Canstance Waite

If you want a period recipe for this sort of thing take a look at the
wafers recipe (I don't remember how it is spelled) in Le Menagier; the
Hinson translation is webbed on my page (follow the medieval link).

David/Cariadoc
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/


Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 06:43:19 -0400
From: Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
Subject: Re: SC - wafer help

Stefan li Rous wrote:
> This page says "complete with cone roller" and shows a shallow wooden
> cone with a handle on it. Anyone know what this cone is for? To roll
> the fresh, soft pizelle around to get a cone? Since you are mashing
> the dough between two hot surfaces, I don't think it is for smoothing
> the wafer with. If it is to make a cone with, is their any evidence of
> this cone shape being used in period? I just remembered seeing "rolled".

The Larousse (that's Larousse, not Li Rous ;  )  ) Gastronomique speaks
of the habit of rolling wafers into both tubes and cornucopia while hot,
becoming brittle as they cool, and says the practice is quite old. We
know, of course, well, Larousse has been known to have a Francocentric
view of both world history and food history (as does Toussaint-Hamat, if
I've got the name right) so the occasional error shows up which is as
wide in dissemination as it is in inaccuracy. Or maybe the other way
around; I haven't had my tea yet, leemee alone. It has some alleged
facts in it which are, well, alleged.

But yes, they do seem to at least imply that rolling wafers into cones
was not unheard of in period. The main problem is that the recipes and
other information we have suggests wafers weren't always crispy enough
to make holding a formed shape likely. I wonder if a cone might have
been wrapped around cheese?

Adamantius


Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 06:49:32 -0400
From: Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
Subject: Re: SC - Pizelles

> I think I missed the post that this is a reply to.  Are pizelles period?  We
> make 'em all the time around here, but I never thought they were period.
> Caitlin ingen ui Dalaig

Wafers seem to have been widely eaten in period Europe, and pizelle
irons seem to be a pretty good way to recreate the shape and pattern of
a wafer. Pizelles tend to be made according to a somewhat different
recipe, with eggs usually separated, more sugar, etc., but they are
presumably a reasonably close descendant.

Gervase Markham's "The English Hus-Wife", c. 1615, gives a wafer recipe
that works quite well with a pizelle iron.

Adamantius


Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 19:48:34 -0400
From: Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
Subject: Re: SC - Wafer recipes please?

Anne-Marie Rousseau wrote:
> does anyone have a reconstructed recipe that they like for wafers???

I'm almost positive (no, I _am_ positive) I posted a reconstruction of
the Markham wafer recipe from The English Hus-wife, 1615, in March or so,
maybe early April. Trouble is, I now can't find it.

By any chance did anyone see it? It worked _really_ well except for a
tendency to brown a bit blotchy if you're not careful: I attribute this
to the milk solids in the cream.

[His original recipe is given further up in this file. - editor]

Adamantius


Subject: Re: wafers
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1999 09:17:57 -0600 (MDT)
From: Linda Peterson <mirhaxa at swcp.com>
To: Stefan li Rous <stefan at texas.net>

Ps. I was just looking at the Maid of Scandinavia, which jogged my memory
that the wafer irons are sometimes refered to as krumkake irons, which may
help in your search. The site also had some recipes under the krumkake
heading.  Mirhaxa

[the URL is: http://www.sweetc.com/maid.htm   -ed]


Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1999 02:07:42 EDT
From: Korrin S DaArdain <korrin.daardain at juno.com>
Subject: Re: SC - Wafer recipes please? OOP - Recipe

Not a period recipe but it is a start.

Cooky Cones

3 eggs
2/3 cup sugar
2/3 cup butter / margarine
2 tsp vanilla
1 tsp almond extract
1 cup all purpose flour

Use a krumkakka iron; bake and roll to cone form, either free hand or
around a cone form.
In a medium sized mixing bowl, beat together eggs, sugar, melted butter,
vanilla, and almond extract. stir in flour until smoothly blended.
Place flat griddle plates on electric waffle iron and preeheat to medium
hot; or use a krumkakka iron.
Makes about 18 small or 9 large cones.
Source: Betty Storrey; Kerman, Cal. via Sunset Magazine 6/83.

Korrin S. DaArdain
Kitchen Steward of Household Port Karr
Kingdom of An Tir in the Society for Creative Anachronism.
Korrin.DaArdain at Juno.com


Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1999 10:00:42 -0400
From: Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
Subject: Re: SC - Revisited Wafers Redaction

The wafers in question, BTW, go great with the "snow" from the New
Proper Boke of Cookery, a stiff-whipped mixture of egg whites and heavy
cream, sweetened with sugar and flavored with rosewater.

Adamantius


Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1999 21:14:35 -0700 (PDT)
From: Laura C Minnick <lainie at gladstone.uoregon.edu>
Subject: Re: SC - Wafer recipes please?

I just checked- there is a readaction of a wafes recipe from _menagier de
Paris_ in _Pleyn Delit_. I don't have an iron so I tried doing it like a
crepe. Interesting, but not what I wanted. My birthday is in November...
;-)

'Lainie
- -
Laura C. Minnick


Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 15:32:53 -0500
From: "Decker, Terry D." <TerryD at Health.State.OK.US>
Subject: RE: SC - Cone History

> Is there a linguistic relationship between wafer and waffle? Could these
> terms have become applied to items cooked between layers of metal?
>
> Mirhaxa
>   mirhaxa at morktorn.com

Wafer derives from the Middle English wafre which comes from the Old
Northern French waufre which is apparently of Germanic origin.  Waffle
derives from the Dutch wafel.

Wafers are thin, crisp biscuits, cookies, cakes or candies.  Waffles are
battercakes cooked in or on an iron mold.  These definitions suggest that
wafers and waffles are two different classes of dish with some overlap.  So, 
the terms get put on the list for my next trip to the OED.

Bear


Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1999 22:00:12 -0700
From: "Laura C. Minnick" <lcm at efn.org>
Subject: Re: SC - Recipe needed

Kerri Canepa wrote:
> All this talk about pizzelle made me go out and buy one. That and we're going 
> to serve wafers at the 12th Night feast next January.
> Is there an authentic wafer recipe? I'd like to have time to play with making
> wafers before the real thing.

There is a wafer recipe from _Menagier de Paris_ redacted and ready in
_Pleyn Delit_. You might want to see what MP has, since the editors of
PD mention that some of the wafers have cheese and some don't. You might
want to look at sweet as well as savories...

'Lainie


Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 00:25:33 -0500
From: "Decker, Terry D." <TerryD at Health.State.OK.US>
Subject: RE: SC - Recipe needed

Scully's redaction of Menagier's recipe from Early French Cookery:

Wafers  (makes about 30 4-inch round wafers)

(Imperial measure)

4 eggs
1 tsp salt
2 tbsp sugar
4 tbsp dessert wine
2-3 tsp oil or fat
1/2 cup + 2 tbsp all purpose flour
1-2 tbsp sugar

Beat eggs lightly.
Whisk in salt, wine, oil and sugar.
Whisk in flour 1 tablespoon at a time until a smooth runny paste is reached.
Drop 1 tablespoon at a time onto a hot sandwich grill or Krumcake iron.
Close grill and press on lid.  Cook until lightly brown--about 1 minute.
Sprinkle with sugar.  Store in airtight container in cool, dry place until
needed.
Re-crisp in a low oven (275 F) before serving.

Bear


Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 06:15:21 GMT
From: kerric at pobox.alaska.net (Kerri Canepa)
Subject: SC - Adventures with wafers - part the second (long)

In the continuing testing of wafers, today's endeavors involved Scully's
redaction of one of the wafer recipes from Menagier. Thanks, Bear.

Scully's redaction of Menagier's recipe from Early French Cookery:

Wafers  (makes about 30 4-inch round wafers)

(Imperial measure)

4 eggs
1 tsp salt
2 tbsp sugar
4 tbsp dessert wine
2-3 tsp oil or fat
1/2 cup + 2 tbsp all purpose flour
1-2 tbsp sugar

The dessert wine was Madeira (it's what my apprentice had on hand) and the oil
was soybean (also, what was available).

Beat eggs lightly.
Whisk in salt, wine, oil and sugar.
Whisk in flour 1 tablespoon at a time until a smooth runny paste is reached.
Drop 1 tablespoon at a time onto a hot sandwich grill or Krumcake iron.
Close grill and press on lid.  Cook until lightly brown--about 1 minute.
Sprinkle with sugar.

The final measures were as stated except for 1/2 cup + 1 1/2 tbsp flour and 2
tbsp of oil.

The batter was clearer than the from the previous recipe but then there was less
flour and more egg in it, but it had the right consistency.

Learning from the first trials, I set the burner on 8 and let it heat up until
water sizzled off the top. Put about a tablespoon or so of batter on the iron
and closed it. I thought there was much whooshing of steam and squirting of
batter the last time; this was downright explosive. It was also quite a workout
on the hands (need to build up your grip? Make wafers...).

This recipe made exactly 2 dozen 5 inch wafers in about an hour and 15 minutes.
These wafers are also much softer than the previous recipe and there's plenty of
time to roll them before they harden. In fact, you'd have to hold them for a
minute or two in whatever shape you want before they'll keep that shape. The
texture is spongier and the wafers tear more than they break. I suspect the eggs
in the recipe contribute greatly to this.

As for taste, I place them more in the savory category than sweet. Again there's
less sugar than the previous recipe but also there's the addition of salt which
is absent from the first. My husband, after having been on a long distance
motorcycle trip returned home tired and hungry, snagged one of the wafers upon
walking into the kitchen and said "I don't like these as much." Well, they
aren't the subtle cookie/wafer the first batch was. However, I think the second
batch would hold up to hypocras in flavor. I don't particularly care for the
texture but then who knows what wafers were really like?

Thankfully, there were no interruptions during this test. Both the kittens
crashed and slept until I had only 3 wafers left and I thoughtfully pulled down
the smoke alarm even before turning on the stove.

I set aside four wafers from each batch to test how well they hold up to
storage. Tuesday my apprentice comes over and we'll see what the verdict is.

Kerri
Cedrin Etainnighean, OL


Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 04:43:34 -0400
From: Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
Subject: Re: SC - Adventures with wafers - part the second (long)

Kerri Canepa wrote:
> These wafers are also much softer than the previous recipe and there's plenty of
> time to roll them before they harden. In fact, you'd have to hold them for a
> minute or two in whatever shape you want before they'll keep that shape. The
> texture is spongier and the wafers tear more than they break. I suspect the eggs
> in the recipe contribute greatly to this.
>
> As for taste, I place them more in the savory category than sweet. Again there's
> less sugar than the previous recipe but also there's the addition of salt which
> is absent from the first. My husband, after having been on a long distance
> motorcycle trip returned home tired and hungry, snagged one of the wafers upon
> walking into the kitchen and said "I don't like these as much." Well, they
> aren't the subtle cookie/wafer the first batch was. However, I think the second
> batch would hold up to hypocras in flavor. I don't particularly care for the
> texture but then who knows what wafers were really like?

I seem to recall a 16th-century French painting reprinted in the
Larousse Gastronomique, showing stacks of wafers being carried by a
waferer/wafer hawker on skewers; the impression I got from looking at it
was that they were, at least at some point in their existence, a bit on
the floppy side. There may have been a range between sweet and savory
ones (sweet ones do tend to get crisper as they cool), or they may
simply have been skewered while warm.

Adamantius


Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 07:58:00 -0700
From: Anne-Marie Rousseau <acrouss at gte.net>
Subject: Re: SC - Adventures with wafers -

hi all from Anne-Marie

I'd been meaning to tell you guys...at our non-SCA 15th century
re-enactment fest we made wafers with great success!

we used Adamantius' recipe and tweaking it a bit (less liquid, more flour,
etc). We used my cast iron wafer iron over the fire. Yum yum yum! Sorry, I
was in the bake house at the time making the days bread, so only got to
play with the fire, not the recipe bit, but they were awful fun to make and
even funner to eat (the dogs were even happy, since they got the ones that
the wind picked up and tossed off the wafer iron).

- --AM, who got to make bread every day in the medievally made oven. woo hoo!


Date: Sun, 29 Aug 1999 23:03:06 -0500
From: Stefan li Rous <stefan at texas.net>
Subject: SC - Polish wafer recipe (long)

Kerri asked about the wafer recipe I mentioned in the new Polish cookbook:
> Would you please post the wafer recipe? I've got one more authentic recipe and
> one modern one left to try and I'd like more authentic ones.

Here it is. It took me a while to scan and convert it. Hope it comes through
ok. I have also included the comments that were with the recipe. As mentioned
in my earlier message neither the original recipe nor translation are given.

Now to order a pizzelle iron so I can try this and the other wafer recipes
I have.

Stefan
- ----------------
>From "Food and Deink in Medieval Poland" by Maria
Dembinska. Revised and Adapted by William Woys Weaver.
University of Pennsylvania Press 1999.

Saffron Wafers (Oplatki Szafranowe)

Saffron was more expensive in Gdansk than in Cracow or
Lvov during the Middle Ages, which suggests that distance
from market source played a key role in determining the
cost of such imported goods. A large portion of Polish
saffron appears to have come from regions bordering the
Black Sea where saffron originated, via Genoese middlemen.
Its use in Polish cookery was a mark of high status, so it
may seem contradictory that it also was commonly used in
foods associated with fasting. Yet saffron wafers were
served at the Polish court during meatless days or at the
end of the meal with various confections and Malvasia wine.

Because they also contained sugar, the wafers were
generally made by specialized confectioners and were
therefore not only sweet but also expensive. Part of the
expense (aside from the saffron and sugar) was high-quality
flour, which had to be farina alba cribrata - the finest
sort. Another reason for the cost was manufacture, for the
art of wafer making is a distinct craft unto itself, and
rather tedious. In spite of this, a good wafer baker was
said to produce about one thousand wafers a day. Indeed, it
was sometimes a specialty of nunneries or monasteries,
which derived income from the sale of such goods.

Wafers were made with irons ornamented with various
patterns that were impressed into the surface of the wafer
as it baked. Polish irons were normally round, although
rectangular North German and Dutch types were also used in
Gdansk and Pomerania.(6)  Metal wafer irons are mentioned
in several medieval sources and on occasion they are
depicted, but none have survived intact. The images were
generally religious, and an especially good wafer maker
would have several sets of irons on hand to meet the demand
of funerals, weddings, and special religious feasts, such
as Easter or Christmas, For everyday use, the royal court
probably served wafers impressed with the royal coat of
arms, or the coat of arms of a special guest if the
intention was to flatter or impress.

Since sugar absorbs and amplifies flavors, wafers must be
made over a smokeless heat source, the most common being a
charcoal stove. This technique requires considerable
practice because the iron must be turned constantly to keep
both halves evenly heated. The iron must be also kept hot
while it is being refilled with wafer batter Last, the
wafers must be trimmed while they are hot and soft and
still in the iron; once cool, they become brittle and break
easily. All of this implies speed and a steady hand with a
very sharp knife. Having tested this recipe with a wafer
iron from the 1500s, I can report that total baking time
per wafer should be about 6 minutes, or 3
minutes per side, depending on the type of metal from which
the iron is is made (there are several alloys) and its thickness.
Accomplished wafer bakers could probably do this in half
the time; I was somewhat restrained by the cautious use of
antique equipment.

1 cup (250 g) double sifted pastry flour

1 cup (250 g) superfine sugar (white sugar ground to a fine
powder, called bar sugar in the United States)

1/4 teaspoon finely ground saffron

4 egg whites

2 to 3 tablespoons (30 to 45 ml) rosewater

poppy seed oil

Yield: About 30 wafers, depending on the size of the iron

Before assembling the ingredients, which should be at room
temperature, light a charcoal grill or old-style charcoal
stove so that the coals have a good 30 minutes to heat and
reduce to embers. Do not use self-lighting charcoal, since
this will give the wafers a burned petroleum flavor.

Sift together the flour, sugar and saffron three
times. Whisk the egg whites until they are stiff and form
peaks, then fold them into the dry ingredients. Moisten
with rose water so that it forms a thick batter.

Heat both sides of the wafer iron (or a pizzelle
iron) over the charcoal stove or grill. When evenly hot on
both sides, open the iron and grease it liberally. Put some
of the batter on one side and let it spread. Slowly close
up the iron but do not press hard, just enough to force the
batter out to the edges. Turn the iron over the coals often
until the batter begins to bubble around the edges, then
press tightly and hold it firmly together, turning the iron
several times (this will caramelize the sugar and cause the
wafer to stiffen). Batter that has run out of the edges can
now be trimmed off neatly with a very sharp knife. Once the
wafer tests done, the iron can be opened and the wafer
removed with the help of a knife. Repeat until all the
batter is used. Perfectly made wafers will bake paper-thin
and turn out a golden fawn color. Once cool, they can be
stored several months in airtight containers.


Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 08:01:23 -0400
From: Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
Subject: Re: SC - Polish wafer recipe (long)

Tollhase1 at aol.com wrote:
> I am having a hard time picturing the iron.  Is it similar to the campfire
> iron things that hamburgers or sealed sandwiches are sometimes cooked in only
> smaller?  And where could you find such a thing?
>
> Frederich

Fairly similar, except not as deep, so your wafer is much thinner than a
grilled cheese sandwich, and with a pattern it stamps into the surface
of the wafer.

Like the grilling iron you mention, it has two plates hinged together on
one edge, with a steel rod sticking out of each plate opposite the
hinge, and a wooden handle on each rod. You can lay it flat on the
burners of your stove, or hold it over a flame, and pour/spoon a
somewhat thick batter (thin ones are too messy; they squirt out around
the edges) onto your hot, greased/seasoned irons, close the irons and
hold the handles together, rather like a nut cracker. Somewhere along
the line you can flip the iron over to brown the other side of your wafer.

Various European import stores are good places to find suitable irons,
sold as krumkake or pizelle irons. If all else fails there's always
Williams-Sonoma, but I wouldn't go there first.

Adamantius


Date: Sat, 04 Sep 1999 00:18:14 GMT
From: kerric at pobox.alaska.net (Kerri Canepa)
Subject: SC - Adventures with wafers - part the third (long)

Since I haven't seen _Food and Drink in Medieval Poland_ myself yet, I decided
to try to get a little more information about the saffron wafers recipe which
Stefan so kindly quoted for me.

I tracked down the editor of the Middle Ages series for the University of
Pennsylvania Press (UPenn Press published _Food and Drink_) to ask a few
questions. What follows is our conversation.
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>I don't know if this book, recently published by UPenn Press, is considered
>part of the Middle Ages series but it seemed a good place to try.
>
>The book is _Food and Drink in Medieval Poland_, the author is Maria Dembinska
>and it was published in 1999. Is there anyway to contact Ms. Dembinska via email?
>I'm an amateur food historian and I have some questions concerning one of the
>recipes (for Saffron Wafers). In particular, I'd like to see the original Polish recipe
>(with a date) and her English translation of it. What's in the book is a modern
>adaptation of the original recipe and I'm interested in a translation.
>
>If she is not available through email but has a physical address, I would appreciate
>receiving it.
>
>Thanks for your help,
>
>Kerri Canepa
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Dear Ms. Canepa:
>
>Maria Dembinska is deceased, but I will forward your message to the book's
>editor and adaptor, William Woys Weaver; I'm sure he will be able to answer
>your queries.
>
>With best regards,
>
>Jerry Singerman
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Dear Ms. Canepa:
>
>Below, the response from Will Weaver to your query.  The original recipe no
>longer survives as such; what he and Dembinska strove to do was to recreate
>the recipes as accurately as possible.
>
>"You might respond to the inquiry this way: The royal accounts
>mention saffron wafers often and purchase orders note the basic ingredients
>only when the wafers were made "in house."  Sometimes they were purchased
>from outside the royal castle (probably from a nunnery or a professional
>wafer baker).  Our only task was to figure out the proportions.  Maria
>interviewed some elderly nuns from a nunnery at Stary Sacz (I believe) to see
>how they made them.  There is a Czech medieval mss that shows either a king
>or saint holding a wafer iron (11th century I believe--it is depicted in the
>wafer book cited in the bibliography). So we had ingredients, we had oral
>material, and we had a visual source.  We then looked at late medieval and
>early renaissance cookery mss to see what the proportions were like.  Nearly
>all of the recipes were the same, I imagine because there is a very narrow
>band one must stay within in order to make the wafer recipe work.  Maria was
>even convinced many of the recipes copied one another, which is doubtless
>true.  I do not know what happened to her notes or personal files, but I
>suppose I could retrieve an old recipe from an Italian or French source, if
>that is what the food historian is looking for."  W3
>
>I hope this helps.
>
>Jerry Singerman
>
>Jerome E. Singerman
>Humanities Editor
>University of Pennsylvania Press
>4200 Pine Street
>Philadelphia, PA 19104-4011
>
>tel:  215 898-1681
>fax:  215 898-0404
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So, as you can see, the saffron wafer recipe as given is an interpretation. I'll
post my results of this recipe when I next play with it.

Kerri
Cedrin Etainnighean, OL


Date: Sun, 19 Sep 1999 16:18:16 GMT
From: kerric at pobox.alaska.net (Kerri Canepa)
Subject: Re: SC - poppy seed oil

Stefan,
>I am planning on trying the saffron wafers in "Food and Drink in Medieval
>Poland" tomorrow. In the recipe it calls for poppy seed oil to coat the
>wafer iron.

Ooh, let me know how the wafers turn out. I haven't had a chance to play with that recipe yet.

>All I could find today, in my large specialty store Central Market, and
>my regular HRB grocery was olive oil (lots of olive oils), seseme oil,
>walnut oil, almond oil and some more modern ones (I assume) such as
>safflower oil, peanut oil, sunflower seed oil and some others.
>
>I bought some almond oil because I thought my first choice, walnut
>oil might lend too much nut taste. As this oil is in direct contact
>with the wafer, the taste may matter. Can anyone tell me if poppyseed
>oil has much of a taste and if so, what it is? Should I use olive oil?
>I have no idea if these different oils have different smoke points
>and whether it would matter in this application.

I've never used poppy seed oil or walnut oil for that matter. I would think that
they would impart a slight flavor but if the wafer is flavored with saffron and
sugar, then I doubt the oil is going to make that much of an impression. Also, you don't need to use much oil at all or it drips out everywhere. Depending on 
the olive oil (the more "virgin" and lighter in color it is, the less strongly flavored), you could try it.

>The wafer iron does have a non-stick coating. Should I just omit the>oil?

That or experiment; do some without and some with oil. It sounds like you have
an electric pizzelle maker so I don't think you need to worry too much about the
smoking point of oils. It's something I have to take into account since I'm
using a hand held over the stove pizzelle maker with less heat control.
Using my pizzelle maker I found that after a certain point, no fats were
necessary to keep the wafer from sticking. I may have been partially due to the
high heat I kept it at, but I couldn't really say for sure.

As an aside, this quote from _Food and Drink in Medieval Poland_
>Metal wafer irons are mentioned
>in several medieval sources and on occasion they are
>depicted, but none have survived intact.

I can at least address. While visiting Buonconsiglia Castle in Trento, Italy,
there was an iron wafer maker on display (with, of course, no identifying notes
or anything) with an heraldic design carved into it. Since the castle had
continuous inhabitants until well into the early 19th c, it could have been from
any number of time periods. Since the heraldry was of the fellow who was a big
honcho during the Council of Trent times, it's likely the iron is from the early
to mid 16th c. Yeah, it's not medieval but it is authentic.

Kerri
Cedrin Etainnighean, OL


Date: Sun, 19 Sep 1999 16:10:08 -0700
From: "Morrigan O'Malley" <scribed at cadvision.com>
Subject: Re: SC - poppy seed oil

>>The wafer iron does have a non-stick coating. Should I just omit the
>>oil?

When I borrowed a pizzelle maker from an Italian friend of mine, he
specifically instructed me _not_ to oil it, as there was more than
sufficient oil in the recipe to prevent the wafers from sticking.  It
wasn't a non-stick kind, but steel.

I don't know the recipe being used, but if it has a high oil content,
perhaps that would be sufficient?

Lemming Cook
Flaming Lemming Inn
proposed canton of <insert name here> Cross, Montengarde, Avacal, An Tir


Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 10:00:36 EDT
From: ChannonM at aol.com
Subject: Re: SC - Stefan's recent wafer experiment

stefan at texas.net writes:
<< Admantius' recipe definitely is not as sweet as the Polish one and of
 course, doesn't have the saffron taste. I think I would like it sweeter
 for a dessert course, but that may not be a medieval thing. I also
 brushed melted margarine on the iron this time, instead of trying to pour
 on almond oil. I'm not sure it needed the butter or oil though as I never
 recoated the iron, but I didn't have any problems with the second or third
 or fourth wafers sticking. >>

I did a feast a few years back and made "A dish of Snowe" and wanted to serve
it with wafers as is mentioned in the original recipe. Here is my work on the
wafers.

The original recipe is found in Le Menagerie de Paris, 1393

Wafers (Gauffres) be made in five ways.  By one method you beat up the eggs
in a bowl then add salt and wine and throw in flour and mix them, and then
put them on two irons, little by  little, each time, as much paste as the
size of a leche or strip of cheese, and press them between the two irons and
cook on both sides and if the iron doth not separate easily from the paste
grease it before hand.
The third method is that Strained Waffles (Gauffers couleisses) and they be
called strained for this reason only, that the paste is clearer and it as it
were boiled clear, after theaforesaid manner and onto it one scatters grated
cheese and all is mixed together.

The fourth method is flour made into a paste with water, salt and wine
without either eggs or cheese.
Item, the wafer makers make another kind called big sticks (gros bastons)
which be made of flour made into a paste with eggs and powdered ginger.

My Recipe
8 eggs
1 c sugar
1 c oil
2 1/2 c flour
2/3 c red wine

 Combine all ingredients. Using a "pizelle" waffle maker (an Italian waffle
like cookie press) pour approximately 1/8 cup of batter into the base. Press
down and release in about 30 seconds or so. If a pizelle maker is not
available you can simply drop batter onto a hot griddle, although the pizelle
maker creates a beautiful lace like wafers. I don’t own one myself but
enquired with all of my Italian friends and their relatives and finally came
up with someone who was happy to lend it to me. The results were great.

This too did tend to brown, and I thought about using white wine, but the
flavour was soooo much better with red. I incorporated the oil into the
batter, this relieved any sticking issues and I never had to oil the iron.
However, this was a teflon iron, which may have helped although in my early
trials, they stuck anyway. In making these waffles for 150 people, the day
before, I knew that re-oiling the iron was going to be very time consuming.
However the end result was everyone enjoyed them and I was not worse for wear.

Hauviette


Date: Fri, 01 Oct 1999 04:39:27 -0400
From: Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
Subject: Re: SC - wafers

Stefan li Rous wrote:
> You cooked the wafers the day before the feast? How did you serve them? Did
> you serve them cool? I had gotten the idea that wafers should be served
> warm and fresh, so I hadn't considered it workable for a normal SCA feast.

Think in terms of how wafers are made, and their overall mass to volume
ratio. They cool off pretty quickly, and a wafer iron makes one, or a
couple, at a time, and as a period cooking utensil probably was fairly
specialized and probably not especially cheap. Then you make them in
batches and, as seems to be documented in many cases, go out and hawk
them on the street like many another specialty merchant.

I don't know they'd have been eaten days old, but I imagine getting them
in quantity where all of them are hot off the irons is unlikely.

Adamantius


Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 08:15:56 EDT
From: ChannonM at aol.com
Subject: Re: SC - wafers

stefan at texas.net writes:
<< Did your wafers brown in blotches or evenly overall?

Yes

<< You cooked the wafers the day before the feast? 
  
---yes, I kept them in sealed containers

<< How did you serve them? 

I placed the "dish of snowe" in the center in a
fluffy pile, polished up some pretty red delicious apples, used an apple
corer/slicer (makes nice 1/8 wedges ) tied the apple with gold ribbon so it
didn't fall apart (I also sprayed the apple with lemon juice/water to prevent
browning. This let the feasters see the plate and then untie the ribbon to
partake in dipping them into the snowe. The original also calls for sprigs of
rosemary, as if this is snow on the branch of an evergreen tree.  Then I
placed the waffles around the "snowe" and gave a slight sprinkling of
confectioners sugar (I know it contains cornstarch, but this was a feast for
over 100 people, I didn't take the time to grind superfine sugar) this step
can be omitted as it doesn't really follow the original recipe.
MMMMMMM!

<<  Did
 you serve them cool? I had gotten the idea that wafers should be served
 warm and fresh, so I hadn't considered it workable for a normal SCA feast. >>

 Yes I served them cool, but I'm not sure how you could serve them hot,
unless you flipped them off the grill onto someones lap. They were nice and
crunchy when cool. I tried rolling them and didn't have much success. It was
also very time consuming, and I weighed the different ideas about
presentation and such. There are also commercially available pizelle's here,
(Windsor) the recipe is very similar AFAIK except the wine,

Did you say you were using a pizelle maker or a regular waffle iron. The
pizelle maker produces very thin beautiful lacy stylized cookies .

Let me know what you think.

Hauviette


Date: Sat, 2 Oct 1999 10:28:55 -0700
From: "Deborah Schumacher" <chicagojo at uswest.net>
Subject: RE: SC - wafers

When I worked  in the Kitchen at the middle kingdoms 12th night 1998,  The
Feast steward did  sweet wafers. We  served them on silver trays and they
were drizzled with a very simple glaze made of  powdered sugar, Grand Manier
and orange juice. They had been made ahead of time and  were stored in a
large tupperware container. They seemed to go over rather well. I'll see if
i can email the feast steward for her recipe, I think it was documented, as
everything else she did was. (It was my first feast working in a kitchen and
somehow i thought they were *all* like that. )
But i would think i would cook them the day before if i could, to save a
little time on the day of the feast.

Zoe


Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 00:43:53 -0500
From: david friedman <ddfr at best.com>
Subject: Re: SC - wafers

Stefan li Rous wrote:
>> You cooked the wafers the day before the feast? How did you serve them? Did
>> you serve them cool? I had gotten the idea that wafers should be served
>> warm and fresh, so I hadn't considered it workable for a normal SCA feast.

and Adamantius answered:
>Think in terms of how wafers are made, and their overall mass to volume
>ratio. They cool off pretty quickly, and a wafer iron makes one, or a
>couple, at a time, and as a period cooking utensil probably was fairly
>specialized and probably not especially cheap. Then you make them in
>batches and, as seems to be documented in many cases, go out and hawk
>them on the street like many another specialty merchant.
>
>I don't know they'd have been eaten days old, but I imagine getting them
>in quantity where all of them are hot off the irons is unlikely.

Rufina regularly brings pre-made wafers to the war, and they are fine as
long as they stay in a sealed container. If they sit out overnight they
tend to get limp. I believe she uses one of Le Menagier's recipes--very
tasty, but I don't know the recipe.

Elizabeth/Betty Cook


Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2000 13:14:36 -0500
From: Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
Subject: Re: SC - Re: Wafers

"Michael F. Gunter" wrote, about his plans for wafers:
> Yes sweet with a sprinkling of powdre douce.
> 
> For a nice sounding savory wafer I recall a wafer made with
> fish and cheese that sounded appetizing.

As I recall that recipe is in "Take A Thousand Eggs or More", but I
could be mistaken, and am unable to check at the moment. Does anybody know?

As for savory wafers, yes, cheese versions exist which would probably be
ideal, but which may not be completely in keeping with people's
expectations (rightly or wrongly) of what a wafer should be: non-sweet
wafers tend to be slightly limp and rubbery compared to sweet ones, but
I'm not really sure how crisp savory wafers in period were supposed to
be. I've seen paintings of wafers skewered on a brochette for portable,
commercial sale, and they look as if they were at least, at one time,
pretty floppy.
  
Another solution might be to use a "sweet" wafer recipe that uses a
minimum of sugar, just as a bare seasoning, rather than a cookie-ish
flavoring. I know some of the Carr's brand of crackers or biscuits, for
example, commonly eaten with cheese, are sweetened in spite of their
being basically a savory cracker, or at least one appropriate for savory accompaniments.

The Markham recipe for wafers (he doesn't specify them as sweet or
savory, as I recall) calls for flour, egg yolks, rosewater, sugar, and
cream; you could probably use only a small amount of sugar and get away
with it.
 
Adamantius


Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2000 06:49:24 -0500
From: Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
Subject: Re: SC - Re: Wafers

Stefan li Rous wrote: 
> > Yes, which is presumably part of why they become more rigid as they cool.
> 
> The sugar is the reason the wafers harden as they cool? Why is this? Is
> the sugar softer or liquid when they come off the iron? Or is there
> something else taking place that I'm not aware of?

Probably moisture in the form of steam, which is more easily and quickly
released from a hot wafer once it's been removed from the iron, and
sugar, which is generally more fluid when warm than when cold, are the
main issues. You know how honey will run almost like water when it's
heated? Sugar, even in solid form at the start, will melt or at least
soften when hot. There may be a gluten thing happening too, whereby
proteins coagulate when hot, but then get still firmer when cold, which
many of us with children will experience over our (or our children's)
morning egg. For that matter, most wafers also contain egg, which has
proteins of its own in addition to gluten.

There are probably other factors as well, but _in general_ cooked doughs
reach maximum firmness when fresh, but cooled after cooking. I'm not
just referring to dessication or staleness.  

Adamantius


Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 10:47:48 -0600 
From: "Decker, Terry D." <TerryD at Health.State.OK.US>
Subject: RE: SC - Re: Wafers

> The sugar is the reason the wafers harden as they cool? Why is this? Is
> the sugar softer or liquid when they come off the iron? Or is there
> something else taking place that I'm not aware of?
> 
> Lord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra

Sugar is a water soluble, crystalline compound.  It changes to a liquid
state when sufficiently heated, often forming molecular chains which become
rigid on cooling, which is why cookies are soft coming out of the oven, and
harden as they cool.  Sugar is mildly hygroscopic and the baking process
removes excess moisture leaving it more so.  Cookies, wafers, etc. absorb
atmospheric moisture and soften over time.

Bear 


Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 20:04:15 EST
From: ChannonM at aol.com
Subject: SC - Re: Dishe of Snowe, LONG

As I had a few requests for the recipe, I'll post it here for anyone who 
would like it.

Hauviette

The 'main work' herein after referred to is:  A Proper Newe Booke of Cokerye, 
16 Century, edited by Catherine Frances Frere, Cambridge; W. Heffer & Sons 
Ltd, 1913, Found in Cariadoc's Miscellany


Sixth dish:A Dish of  Snowe with French Wafers

Original Recipe- Main work page 25
To Make a Dyschefull of Snowe 
Take a pottel of swete thycke creame and the whytes of eyghte egges, and 
beate them altogether wyth a spone, then putte them in youre creame and a 
saucerfull of Rosewater, and a dyshe full of Suger wyth all, then take a 
stycke and make it cleane, and then cutte it in the ende foure square, and 
therwith beate all the aforesayde thynges together and ever as it ryseth take 
it of and put it into a Collaunder, this done take one apple and set it in 
the myddes of it and a thicke bushe of Rosemary, and set it inn the  myddes 
of the platter, then cast your Snowe uppon the Rosemarye and fyll your 
platter therewith. And yf you have wafers caste some in wyth all and thus 
serve them forthe.

Redacted Recipe
 take 2 quarts of cream, 8 egg whites, a 1/4 cup of rosewater, 1 cup of sugar
and beat the cream with a wisk and the eggs, rose water and sugar.Mix them 
with the cream. Place an apple and a sprig of rosemary in the centre of a 
platter and surround with the mixture. If you have wafers, place some in the 
dish and serve.

Modern Version : Serves 8
1/2 pint whipping cream
1 egg white 
2 tsp rosewater
1/4 cup sugar

Beat the egg white and slowly add the sugar until stiff peaks form. Beat the 
whipping cream and rose water until stiff. Blend the two gently with a 
folding motion. Refridgerate until used.

French Wafers

The original recipe is found in Le Menagerie de Paris, 1393

Wafers (Gauffres) be made in five ways.  By one method you beat up the eggs 
in a bowl then add salt and wine and throw in flour and mix them, and then 
put them on two irons, little byb  little, each time, as much paste as the 
size of a leche or strip of cheese, and press them between the two irons and 
cook on both sides and if the iron doth not separate easily from the paste 
grease it before hand.
The third method is that Strained Waffles (Gauffers couleisses) and they be 
called strained for this reason only, that the paste is clearer and it as it 
were boiled clear, after theaforesaid manner and onto it one scatters grated 
cheese and all is mixed together.

The fourth method is flour made into a paste with water, salt and wine 
without either eggs or cheese.
Item, the wafer makers make another kind called big sticks (gros bastons) 
which be made of flour made into a paste with eggs and powdered ginger.
  
Modern Recipe based on "pizelle recipe" see below
8 eggs
1 c sugar
1 c oil
2 1/2 c flour
2/3 c red wine
 Combine all ingredients. Using a "pizelle" waffle maker (an Italian waffle 
like cookie press) pour approximately 1/8 cup of batter into the base. Press 
down and release in about 30 seconds or so. If a pizelle maker is not 
available you can simply drop batter onto a hot griddle, although the pizelle 
maker creates a beautiful lace like wafers. I don't own one myself but 
inquired with all of my Italian friends and their elderly relatives and 
finally came up with someone who was happy to lend it to me. The results were 
great.


Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2000 17:57:49 -0500 (CDT)
From: Jeff Heilveil <heilveil at uiuc.edu>
Subject: SC - Waffles and Books

Was hunting in the library today and found some interesting
books...  The Art of Dining by Sara Paston-Williams. It was originally
published by the national trust enterprises ltd. in 1993 and is
destributed in the US by Harry N. Abrams, Inc.  I REALLY like what I have
seen of this one so far.  She gives the original, along with the source
right in the open (along with the date written for those of us who can
never remember) and then her redactions (which aren't that great, but the
original is there) and any pictures she has found that are relevant.  She
also talks about dining practices, but I just got home from work and
haven't looked at it yet.  The book also covers some post-period
confections and beverages, but she is real clear about giving dates.  
However, there is a picture there that is intruiging...  "A dutch kitchen
scene by Joachim de Beukelae painted in the 1550s" so there's this tray of
waffles, and a long handled waffle-iron like you could purchase for
camping...  Didn't know waffles were period.  It doesn't look like
pastilles (SP), just rectangles with a grid on it like a... waffle.  Do we
have any period recipes for the batter?  Looks like they are eating
flounder too, or at least some other flattened fish with both eyes on top
of the head...  There's also a loaf of bread with some need oval shapes
pressed into it.

The two other books I found I'll have to translate out of German, but I
will try to get a recipe or two done from one of them each day (err, well,
I did say I would TRY).
The one I am starting with is Kuchenmeysterey (Passau: Johann Petri, um
1486)  By Rolf Ehnert.  It's a small book, but a facsimile of the
Kuchenmeysterey with an afterword.  copywrite 1981.

The other is Wildu machen ayn guet essen.... by Doris Aichholzer.
Published by Peter Lang.  copywrite 1999.

Bogdan
_______________________________________________________________________________
Jeffrey Heilveil M.S.		      Ld. Bogdan de la Brasov, C.W.
Department of Entomology	A Bear's paw and base vert on field argent
University of Illinois		    	  


Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2000 09:45:26 +0200
From: "Cindy M. Renfrow" <cindy at thousandeggs.com>
Subject: Re: SC - Waffles and Books

IIRC, Le Menagier gives several recipes for 'crisps' batter. Waffles,
wafers, crisps, whatever you want to call them are very old.

Cindy


Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2000 08:07:04 -0600
From: Serian <serian at uswest.net>
Subject: Re: SC - Waffles and Books

I researched waffles/wafers because I have an old family
recipe.  I didn't find any batters like modern waffle
batter, but Le Menagier has 4.  I've made one of them which
has cheese and red wine in them.  They're quite good.

Serian


Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2000 14:23:14 -0600
From: Serian <serian at uswest.net>
Subject: Re: SC - Waffles and Books

One common way of serving wafers/waffles is with hippocras
and things like candied anise seeds and sugared almonds. 
Check out Le menagier online.  Most of the meals mention
hypocras and wafers.
Serian
http://www.best.com/%7Eddfr/Medieval/Cookbooks/Menagier/Menagier.html


Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2000 10:49:53 -0500
From: david friedman <ddfr at best.com>
Subject: Re: SC - Waffles and Books

At 9:45 AM +0200 6/30/00, Cindy M. Renfrow wrote:
>IIRC, Le Menagier gives several recipes for 'crisps' batter. Waffles,
>wafers, crisps, whatever you want to call them are very old.
>
>Cindy

I think there are three different things here:

1. Funnel cakes (the Two Fifteenth Century Crispes, and various other 
things elsewhere, such as mincebek in _Two Anglo Norman_. )

2. Wafers (served with hippocras in Menagier): Presumably waffle 
pattern, but more like a crisp cookie, at least as I have seen them 
made.

3. Modern waffles: Waffle pattern, but thick with a pancake like texture.

Off hand, I am not sure I have seen anything that is clearly made 
like a modern waffle. One thing worth checking is whether there are 
any surviving wafer irons, and if so if the separation between the 
plates is thin, as in a modern wafer iron, or thick, as in a waffle 
iron.

David/Cariadoc
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/


Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2000 16:35:19 -0400 (EDT)
From: alysk at ix.netcom.com
Subject: SC - Waffles, Turkey, and Trifle

Greetings.  Recently, there were posts (if my feeble brain recalls
correctly) about period documentation for waffles, turkey and trifle.
While bumming around during my vacation I came across some of each
and thought I'd post in case there still was interest - or it hadn't
been settled.

Waffles are pictured in a book I found at Borders, _Bruegel_ by Keith
Roberts (on sale for $5.99).  Bruegel was active in the last half
of the 1500s. There are a minimum of two pictures, one with several
representations.  The waffles are clearly thick, clearly gridded, and
rectangular or square.  One very rectangular grouping is carried in
the hatband of the person pictured.  "The Fight between Carnival and
Lent" (1559) shows four depictions and has the ones tied onto the hat.

The other painting is "The Gloomy Day (February)", 1565, and depicts
a man eating a waffle.

<snip of turkey info - see turkeys-msg>

<snip of trifle info - see dessert-msg>

Alys Katharine


Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2000 14:03:44 +1000
From: "Craig Jones." <craig.jones at airservices.gov.au>
Subject: SC - Wafer recipes

>Drake commented: 
>> If you can get your hands on a wafer iron, I have a great "coeliac friendly"
>> saffron wafer recipe.
>
>Please post this! I'd love to have another wafer recipe. Is this, even
>better, a period recipe? The only other "saffron" wafer recipe I have
>is from the Polish cookbook discussed here recently. And I never got
>it to stick together in one piece. Lots of crumbly, good tasting, pretty
>fragments. But a pain to clean off the wafer iron and not exactly 
>a "wafer".

Um, O dear.  That was the recipe I used!!!  I just modified it so it used Rice
flour instead. Spank me for being naughty and modifying a period recipe for my
nefarious purposes. I found the wafers crumbly too but the recipe is skewed
wrong so it ends up with the wrong consistancy.  Wafer batter should be stiff
like waffle batter.  I can look at the recipe tonight if you wish...

Did you lightly brush the iron with butter?

I also found that no matter how little a dollop I put in the middle, I also got
mixture squirting out the side and I noticed that there are two ways of cooking
the wafer.

1) Put a dollop of batter on and press down really quick and hard.  Makes a
very thin wafer.
2) Put a dollop of batter on, wait 20-30 secs and press down slowly for a
thicker wafer (and not so much shooting out the side). Works for looser
batters.

What kind of wafer maker do you have?  I have one of the swedish cast iron ones
with a scroll pattern.  I produces a 4-in diameter circular wafer.  My pelican
has about 3, handed down to her from her Norwegian Mother.

Cheers,

Drake.

ps.  Anyone else out there have a wafer iron and some funky wafer recipes.  How
     common was it to serve wafers at a feast?

pps. At Lochac's Midwinter, I spent all Sunday morning cranking out Rosewater
     wafers.  They were a huge hit.  We actually had 6 year old, in total gales
     of tears.  When asked by two ladies, he said 'I didn't get a pancake'. 
     After being regaled of this story as we were cleaning up, I cranked out a
     small batch of batter and made him a couple.  Never seen a set of eyes
     light up when he was presnted with 3 'pancakes' just for him.  A magical
     moment (which are rare for me in the SCA these days).


Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2000 10:20:51 -0400
From: Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
Subject: Re: SC - Wafer recipes

"Craig Jones." wrote:
> >> I also found that no matter how little a dollop I put in the middle, I also
> >> got mixture squirting out the side and I noticed that there are two ways of
> >> cooking the wafer.
> >
> >Yes, I sometimes had that problem. I thought I could become expert enough
> >to drop just the exact size dollop of batter in just the exact spot on
> >the wafer iron to prevent the overflow. I never did.
> 
> Must be some secret ninja technique to it.  As the knight's have there "13
> secret Knight Shots", I'm sure there are 13 secret cooking laurel techniques.
> Maybe have X ml of the dough loaded into a syringe and apply it to the direct
> center (measured with some secret quantum device) might work...

At the risk of incurring the enmity of Certain Kingdoms' Laurel Councils
for breaking the Confidentiality of the Order, (but we know it ain't the
People's Republic of the Eastrealm because we'd never have anything so
formal as a Laurel Council, we're more of a Free Trayned Bande of
Insurrectionists) I will reveal to the select few this secret cooking
laurel technique: 

Place your dollop of batter on your bottom iron just off-center, by
perhaps ten percent of the total diameter of the iron, in the direction
of the hinge. Assuming you have the right amount, and only you can
determine what that is after a few trial runs (Napoleon is said to have
claimed the first crepe was always the property of the cat, this is a
similar deal), the action of closing the iron will push the main mass of
the batter away from the hinge and back toward the center.

Ultimately, though, the trick is to practice, observe during and between
trial attempts and adjust accordingly. Like archery, where you sometimes
have to calibrate by seeing how far off target your sight mark puts your
arrow, you then figure the spatial relationship between the calculated
mark and the real thing, and hold your bow accordingly. If your wafer
batter is dropped in the wrong place, resulting in batter shooting out
one side instead of filling the irons, place the next dollop a bit away
from that edge, and remember that everything will move, to some extent,
when you close the irons.

Of course, this can be difficult to do correctly when you're making a
dozen wafers, or even two, but if we're going to worry about getting
professional results every time, we should bear in kind that a
professional, town waferer, the guys crying their wares out on the
streets, with hundreds of wafers stuck on a big skewer, made them for
hours for many days running, possibly every day of the year, or most of
them. The closest most of us can get is to make them for a large event,
expecting the first several of the several hundred to be a little wonky,
the ones in the middle to be almost or functionally perfect, and perhaps
the last few becoming increasingly weird as the fatigue factor sets in. 

> >> 1) Put a dollop of batter on and press down really quick and hard.  Makes a
> >> very thin wafer.
> >> 2) Put a dollop of batter on, wait 20-30 secs and press down slowly for a
> >> thicker wafer (and not so much shooting out the side). Works for looser
> >> batters.
> >
> >Interesting idea. I'll have to consider trying these two and see how it
> >works. I was afraid to let it sit too long and usually closed it as soon
> >as I got a good dollop on each wafer area.
> 
> Just a few seconds.  I'm also using a manual iron that I sit either on an open
> fire or on a trivet onto of my gas stove at home.

Yeah, that's what I use, too. If it works, it works, and this applies
both to equipment and method.

> >Apparently it has not been uncommon in the East Kingdom. I don't know if
> >it has
> >ever been done at an Ansteorran feast. And I have only done it for a
> >Yule pot
> >luck local feast and for the Royalty and entourage at a small luncheon.
> >I'd like
> >to spread the idea around some in Ansteorra. It was apparently fairly common
> >at some period feasts.
> >
> >I never got the savory recipe to work either. If anyone has a recipe for a
> >savory (ie: with cheese) wafer recipe that has worked for them, I'd like to
> >get it.

The East used to have a radically different set of site-availability
dynamics than a lot of places, I gather, and when I first joined the SCA
(the time I stayed, that is) in 1982, we used to have a lot of evening
dessert revels. Wafers with snow (sometimes made by cheaters who would
simply substitute whipped cream for snow) used to be an old standby in
areas where specific people Had A Wafer Iron. We actually used to
contact people around the Kingdom and ask them to bring 600 wafers to
Twelfth Night. Come to think of it, we still do. 
 
> I'm gonna work on the cheese and red wine wafer recipe till I get it right...

FWIW, I've found my recipe, or rather the basic Markham recipe, works
pretty well by radically reducing the sugar (but not eliminating it) and
adding some grated Parmagianno cheese. You have to watch carefully for
burning and there's a small percentage of crispness loss, but overall
they're pretty good. I haven't figured out how to do them as Le
Menagier's Toasted Cheese Sandwich Wafers, but these aren't bad at all.
 
> >> pps. At Lochac's Midwinter, I spent all Sunday morning cranking out
> Rosewater
> >> wafers.  They were a huge hit.  We actually had 6 year old, in total gales
> >> of tears.  When asked by two ladies, he said 'I didn't get a pancake'.
> >> After being regaled of this story as we were cleaning up, I cranked out a
> >> small batch of batter and made him a couple.  Never seen a set of eyes
> >> light up when he was presnted with 3 'pancakes' just for him.  A magical
> >> moment (which are rare for me in the SCA these days).
> >
> >Very nice. I'm afraid such moments have been rather rare for me in the
> >SCA for awhile, too.

Sounds like a lovely experience, definitely one to restore a sense of
why we do this... on the other hand, my own recent experiences include a
small child discovering the wafers somebody had made ("You should try
those cookies! They're really good!"), then moving on to his first taste
of period gingerbread, saying with that bell-clear, penetrating voice
only a small kid can achieve, "Hey, I really like those big brown spicy
balls!" From there to having half the hall sounding like Isaac Hayes was
but a small step... . 
 
> O, I dunno.  You're a bit of a legend here in Lochac.  I must know at least
> 30-40 in Lochac personally who use the floregium regularly.  It's a very
> profound service you offer there.

I seem to recall doing, out of curiosity, a Google web search for
"Stefan li Rous" and getting 2,690 hits. It seems to be a significant
web presence, wouldn't you say?

Adamantius


Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2000 11:06:17 EDT
From: Aelfwyn at aol.com
Subject: Subject: Re: SC - Wafer recipes 

"Craig Jones."writes:
<< I'm gonna work on the cheese and red wine wafer recipe till I get it 
right... 
  >>

We did wafers for our Northern Lights feast last spring. Used both the sweet 
and savory recipes. I found that the savory (with cheese) one worked better 
after the iron was well heated from having made about a hundred of the sweet 
variety. My (okay on loan from my Mother-in-law) iron is an electric by 
Villaware. I have also found that I can get a crisper wafer by using a 
thinner batter consistency. Oh and they store better if sprinkled with some 
granulated sugar in the sealed plastic baggie; less softening and sticking 
together. Like Stefan and Drake, I'm still working on the fine art of wafer 
making. Keep those recipe variations coming! I've learned that my husband's 
Aunt has a nonelectric wafer maker and hope to compare notes with her after 
Pennsic. She is Norwegian and makes 'em "like back home."

Aelfwyn


Date: Sun, 03 Sep 2000 09:41:12 -0500
From: Diana L Skaggs <upsxdls_osu at ionet.net>
Subject: SC - Re: OOP-wafer recipes

>Anyone else playing with waffers?
>-- Harriet

OOH, Pizzelles!  I play with my pizzelle iron often.  I'm planning on
taking my iron to a ren faire next month, and selling the wonderful little
things at a food booth.  I've had my pizzlle iron for over 15 years...
My iron came with the following recipe, just a bit different from yours:

3 eggs, beaten
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup melted butter
1 1/2 cup flour
1 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp. anise seed or extract

Mix together in order given (I mix the baking powder in with the flour,
then add).  Bake.

Lately, I've been experimenting with different spicing.  I used the basic
recipe, decreased the vanilla to 1 tsp, and added 3/4 tsp. cinnamon.  I
also had a success with ginger in the same amounts.  For a more intense
flavor, use more spices.  The anise can be replaced with 1 tsp. grated
lemon peel ( or lemon extract), for a wonderful lemon wafer (great with
tea).  Have you tried rolling them yet?  If you pull them off the iron and
roll them around something the size of a broom handle, you can fill them
with sweetened whipped cream, or any other sweet filling.  Leanna


Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 13:59:31 -0600
From: Serian <serian at uswest.net>
Subject: Re: SC - rosettes? pizelli?

I'll jump in with more later, but, Rosettes come in some
really neat shapes, like butterflies.  

The history of waffle cookies/wafers is a pet project of
mine because of a long history of a waffle recipe in my
family.  (I know, some of you think this is a backwards way
to get into food research, but that's what sparked my
curiosity in this particular instance).  I haven't read the
whole thread yet, so thanks to any who post other
information. ....

Here's my Wafer/Pizzelle research so far.  Someone just told
me about a later period source with wafers made with cream. 
This would have been entered in A&S except they allowed only
one entry per subcategory. (but my candy took 2nd).

Waffles
Prepared by Lady Serian

I have chosen one of the 4 ways of making wafers outlined in
Le Menagier de Paris.  

Waffles [127] are made in four ways. In the first, beat eggs
in a bowl, then salt and wine, and add flour, and moisten
the one with the other, and then put in two irons little by
little, each time using as much batter as a slice of cheese
is wide, and clap between two irons, and cook one side and
then the other; and if the iron does not easily release the
batter, anoint with a little cloth soaked in oil or fat. -
The second way is like the first, but add cheese, that is,
spread the batter as though making a tart or pie, then put
slices of cheese in the middle, and cover the edges (with
batter: JH); thus the cheese stays within the batter and
thus you put it
between two irons. - The third method, is for dropped
waffles, called dropped only because the batter is thinner
like clear soup, made as above;
and throw in with it fine cheese grated; and mix it all
together. - The fourth method is with flour mixed with
water, salt and wine, without eggs or cheese.

Waffles / Wafers have changed through the ages.  Somewhere
along the line, recipes developed that include butter and
almond or anise flavoring rather than wine and cheese.

This is an old (I can trace it back 200 years in my own
family) family recipe for pizzelles or "waffle cookies". I
am making it purely for enjoyment, and in contrast to the
period wafers I prepared for competition.  A number of
ingredients differ.

Ingredients:
Flour
Eggs
Butter
Almond extract or anise oil (or extract)
Sugar


Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2003 17:41:38 -0500
From: johnna holloway <johna at sitka.engin.umich.edu>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Wafers recipe?
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

This is my version that I use. Historical notes follow--
See also my TI articles from the early 1980's for more recipes and  
notes.

THL Johnnae llyn Lewis
----------------------------
Basic Sweet Wafer with Butter

1 3/4 - 2 cups flour (varies-- depends on how one measures and if one is
using jumbo eggs)
1 stick (8 Tablespoons or 1/4 pound) melted butter
3/4 cup sugar
3 eggs - extra large or even jumbo
pinch salt
Flavoring which can be 2 teaspoons of what you like: anise, almond,
hazelnut, lemon, orange, rosewater, etc. Or you can use ground cinnamon,
or cloves or combination of spices. Aniseed is traditional.

Mix eggs and sugar together. Then add flour and salt. Then add melted
butter and flavoring. You can do this by hand or use a mixer.
Egg size is a factor as some batches seemed to need 4 eggs; others only three. These 50 cents per dozen eggs seem to vary some in size.

[Depending on the flavoring chosen, one will have to vary the amount
slightly to get the balance right. This is very much personal preference
as to whether you want a mild or strong taste. You can also use fresh
orange or lemon zest and fresh orange or lemon juice. Also this recipe can be
adapted to using brown sugar and/or a mix of brown and white sugar.]

Bake according to instructions that come with your irons. You may be
using krumkake or pizelle irons. These vary in thickness from
manufacturer to manufacturer. Thin with milk if needed. You'll have to adjust dough depending on thickness or thinness of the wafers and type of iron being used. In general this makes a very good "cookie" type of wafer that tastes good and is well liked.

This makes 42 approximately of the small 3 inch wafers. They keep well
and can be done 2-3 days in advance. Store in plastic boxes. The thicker
wafers travel and store better. Thiner krumkake or rolled wafers are
more fragile and require more care. I tend to make and store flat, as
I usually do this by myself. If you want to make and roll the wafers, then
have someone else work with you. One person handles the iron while the
other person rolls the warm cookies.

Historical Notes from Red Spears Banquet-- Given in the Barony of the
Red Spears in December 2002 by Lady Helewyse de Birkestad.
http://www.midrealm.org/hrothgeirsfjordr/yule/feast.html

Scappi's recipes from 1570 calls for wheat flour,
rosewater, sugar, simple water, fresh egg yolks and using almond milk;
it serves as a source of comparison. Translations were made by Lady
Helewyse de Birkestad based upon copies that I found and supplied.

Scappi Cap CXLI , folio 420, book 6
To make wafers with crumb of bread and sugar.
Take crumb of bread and let it moisten in cold water and strain
it through a sieve.  Make a paste of it and wheat flour, rosewater
and sugar and simple water and fresh egg yolks.  Because otherwise
you won’t be able to make wafers make the paste liquid and firm.
When you have the irons add a little malmsey wine, and make the wafers.
If you want it with pulp of capons boiled in water and salt.
Paste this meat in a mortar and temper with a little cold water
and pass with the bread crumb through the sieve and mix together with the other things and make wafers. One can also make with almond milk and egg yolks."

Red Spear's sweet dessert Cialdoni were made using my more traditional and
perfected recipe of white flour, butter, eggs, and sugar, with chosen
flavorings of lemon and orange. The thinner rolled Cialdoni have a
batter of the same ingredients thinned with the addition of milk. Having
made wafers off and on for most of my now thirty years in the Society,
I have found that almost all diners prefer the sweeter and richer wafer  
Made with butter and sugar.

One problem with period recipes is that they can stick to even the non-stick
irons and that slows the process down to the extent that it's really not
practical to make them in quantities for an event. Another period recipe from a 16th century manuscript that I tried took almost four times longer to make and could only be made one wafer at a time due to sticking. The recipe complained in fact that the wafers would stick.

Johnnae llyn Lewis

Johnna Holloway
(yes, promised wafer cookbook is coming... one of these days)


Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2003 15:57:39 +0000
From: "Olwen the Odd" <olwentheodd at hotmail.com>
Subject: RE: [Sca-cooks] appetizers
To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org

Speaking of wafers, we hit on a good way to store them so they don't get 
soft so we can pre-make them the day before.  We use one of the round 
plastic cooler jugs (the personal size ones)  The wafers fit in nicely 
stacked and snug so even knocking the jugs around they are safe and crisp.

Olwen


Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2003 13:18:07 -0500
From: Johnna Holloway <johnna at sitka.engin.umich.edu>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] appetizers
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

[transporting or storing wafers]
I use gallon or gallon and a half plastic containers that come with
ice cream. The small wafers go in three stacks per container. Larger
ones are placed in the middle and are then filled in with other wafers
around the edges. The thinner krumkakes are the ones that are subject
to breaking.

Johnnae


Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 15:31:59 EST
From: KristiWhyKelly at aol.com
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] appetizers
To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org

If you are trying to store a large number of wafers a foil lined copy paper 
box will do the trick.  I stored over 1600 of them for over a month, they 
stayed crisp and didn't go stale.

Grace


Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 20:30:31 EST
From: KristiWhyKelly at aol.com
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] wafers
To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org

I did it for Atlantia 20 year a few years back, it was the Sunday meal. It
took 6 copy paper boxes and I had to use 6 gallon sized zip locs for the rest.
The boxes were lined with foil and then I put a sheet or two on top of the
filled box then the lid.  The wafers were in good shape (not too many broken)
and still crisp and fresh tasting.

We were a team of 3 people, I mixed the batches and my two girl friends
manned two pizzelle irons each.  We did it in two nights.  Not bad!

The recipe that I used was from 'All the King's cooks' but I did flavor them
with modern flavors.  Anise 1000 and 600 lavender.

I had lots left over and they kept for at least an other month in the boxes,
by then I was sick of them and threw them away.

Grace

pixel at hundred-acre-wood.com writes:
Grace commented:
>>>>
> If you are trying to store a large number of wafers a foil lined copy paper
> box will do the trick.  I stored over 1600 of them for over a month, they
> stayed crisp and didn't go stale.<<<
>
> 1600? How many copy paper boxes did that take? And how long did it take you
> to make that many? I'm surprised you weren't worried about the first ones
> going stale before you finished the last ones. Last Thursday night I baked 
> wafers for the cookie exchange. It took me about an hour and a half to make 38 
> with my iron. 1600? Was this by yourself or did you have an army of bakers and
> pizelle irons to do this? 1600? :-)
>
> And which recipe did you use? Was it one that has been discussed here 
> previously?
>
> Stefan

Ok, now I'm wondering. My sweetie and I once were trying to figure out how
long it would take to make the 20,000 to 30,000 wafers that Chiquart says
to have your pastry cook make, and I was wondering what the members of
this fine list might have to say on the topic.

Using my manual non-electric krumkake iron, on the electric stove, it took
about two minutes per wafer. By my calculations that would be about 1000
man-hours to make that many wafers, and that's just the cooking part.

Margaret


Date: Sun, 07 Mar 2004 14:31:09 -0500
From: Johnna Holloway <johnna at sitka.engin.umich.edu>
Subject Re: [Sca-cooks] wafers
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

SCAbeathog at cs.com wrote:
> Our local cooking guild is considering serving wafers at our upcoming Baron's
> Feast, preparing most of them ahead of time and, perhaps, some on site (this
> is an outdoor event).  I just spent a pleasant hour or so in Stefan's
> Florlegium Archive and now, armed with advice, am ready to begin 
> experimenting!
>
> My question is, what should we serve with them?  Snow is mentioned, which we
> might like to try.  But, I recall someone, on this list,  offering several
> other suggstions, but I can't find this posting.  Does anyone recall? 
>  I believe lemon curd was one, but what else?
>
> Beathog

Lots of people just eat them like modern cookies.
They pick them up off the trays and just walk off
munching them. They go well with various fruits
and things like apple sauce and creams. Where
or how would you eat a modern sugar cone or
waffle cone if it was served without ice cream?

Johnnae


Date: Sun, 7 Mar 2004 14:36:38 -0500
From: "Barara Benson" <vox8 at mindspring.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] wafers
To: "Cooks within the SCA" <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

I frequently serve Wafers with Angel's Food. A concoction of Rocitta,
Marscapone, Sugar and Rose Water. Sometimes, in addition to the Angel's 
Food I serve a tart fruit preserve that complements it nicely.

THL Tara Carr revently served them at a feast to accompany Zabaglone.

--Serena da Riva


Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 09:30:14 -0400
From: Daniel Myers <edouard at medievalcookery.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] SWEET wafers?
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

On Jun 24, 2004, at 8:10 AM, Bronwynmgn at aol.com wrote:
> I was planning on making some wafers for the hospitality suite for Known
> World Heraldic and Scribal Symposium this weekend, and noticed something very
> interesting.  The only actual wafer recipes I have in my sources are from Le
> Menagier.  None of his 5 versions mentions sugar or any other sweetening - they are
> basically flour, eggs, wine, sometimes salt, and sometimes cheese. I've made
> these, and they've come out pretty bland, although the cheese ones come out
> kind of like cheese crackers and are passable.  I suppose using a sweet wine
> might make them a bit sweeter.
>
> On the other hand, nearly every redaction I've seen for wafers includes sugar
> and comes out sweet, like a modern pizzelle.  Are there any period (for my
> purposes, 15th century and earlier, European) wafers recipe which call for
> sweetening in the batter?

Here's one - though it has the cheese and such as well.

[Source: Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books]  Waffres. Take the Wombe
of A luce, & sethe here wyl, & do it on a morter, & tender chese
ther-to, grynde hem y-fere; than take flowre an whyte of Eyroun & bete
to-gedere, then take Sugre an pouder of Gyngere, & do al to-gederys, &
loke that thin Eyroun ben hote, & ley ther-on of thin paste, & than
make thin waffrys, & serue yn.

- Doc
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
   Edouard Halidai  (Daniel Myers)
   Cum Grano Salis


Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2004 10:21:11 -0700 (PDT)
From: Huette von Ahrens <ahrenshav at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Life is Grand...
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

--- Craig Jones <drakey at webone.com.au> wrote:
> Bog standard fare for me and I must have cooked
> most of the recipes at
> least half a dozen times...  Just a little bit
> of each recipe...  Wafer
> iron was being a pain in the *ss.  Kept
> sticking and the waffres,
> although crisp were still a bit too doughy for
> my liking...

Is your iron electric or manual?  Is is regular
or teflon?

When I make wafers or waffles, I always use
a non-stick cooking spray with every wafer or
waffle I make, even if the iron is teflon-coated;
and sometimes, especially because it is teflon.
It is amazing how many thing will still stick
to teflon.

As for the doughy-ness, I believe that you should
have thinned the batter down with whatever liquid
you used in the recipe.  Doughy-ness usually
means that the batter is too thick.  As to how
much to add, that is a guess, depending on how
much batter you made in the first place.  If I
had 8 cups of batter to be thinned, I would start
with adding 1/8 cup liquid and testing again to
see how it cooked.  Eventually you will find
the right consistency.  When you do, you should
mark the recipe with your additions, so that when
you make it again, you don't go through the
process all over again.  Believe me, I've been
there and done that and remembered to mark the
recipe the second time around!

Huette


Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2004 22:23:49 -0500
From: Johnna Holloway <johnna at sitka.engin.umich.edu>
Subject: [Sca-cooks] wafers
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

>>>
I have wafers/waffles on the brain! I've been
researching different recipes. Now, I'm on the verge of making some.

I can't find information on what would be more
appropriate, a pizellle maker, a krumkake iron or just
plain undecorated wafers.
Can someone pint me in the right direction?

Kind Regards, Clara von Ulm
<<<

Wafers? I am always game for communications on wafers.

I have four of the new electric machines now purchased
in the last 3 years. 3 are Villaware and one was Chef's Choice.
I know ths sounds like madness but I think own 7 electric ones now.
I also own a stovetop giro, two or 3
pizzelle, and at least one or two krumkake bakers for burner use.
  You name it I own the version of it. (Remember I am ostensibly working  
on a book on this topic. I keep running across good buys.
  I have been into wafers for nearly 30 years. I did wafers back when few others were doing wafers.)

I suggest non-stick electric if you are planning to seriously
make wafers for a feast. I have done 600 plus using he Villaware
electric irons.
  If left flat, they don't take more effort than doing "cookies". The thin
krumkake ones tend to crumble, but the sturdier Italian pizzelles make
up in advance and transport well.
The krumkakes are best made on site or require careful packing. The pizzelle
irons (either the two or mini 4 at a time) make a thicker cookie. I take
those out and let them harden up on a rack. Then they are gathered up and
put into plastic containers in stacks.

So that's the story. I would advise looking around because there are
some really good deals.

As to which I prefer, it's a toss-up. I like them all. The krumkake are
of course much thinner and more fragile. They work best with a batter.
The other ones can be either a batter or can be the type where you roll
balls of dough out or drop spoonfuls of dough on the plates. They all
make a good cookie. And the recipes vary enough that having a variety
of irons makes sense at least in my kitchen.

Hope this helps,
Johnnae llyn Lewis


Date: Fri, 24 Dec 2004 13:37:03 -0500
From: "Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius"
	<adamantius.magister at verizon.net>
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Helpful Hint From Horatius...
To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org

In our Common Sense Earned The Hard Way department, I thought I'd
relate this little snippet which may conceivably come in handy to
some of you.

I found myself making a half-batch of the Markham sweet cream wafers
this morning, and had noted the previous time I made a batch that I
was having trouble getting them consistently the same size, and was
wasting a lot of batter due to spillage out of the edges of the iron,
which for me is one of the standard old-fashioned clamshell type
pizzelle irons that you heat on the stovetop. It's exactly five
inches across.

Anyway, I found that a level scoop from a #40 sorbet-type scoop
(which has a .8 fluid ounce capacity and one of those thumb-trigger
thingies that pushes the contents out) was the perfect tool for
exactly filling the wafer iron without overflow or empty space, so
that means more actual wafers from your recipe.

Of course, your iron may be different from mine, but I guess the
essential lesson is to find the right size spoon or scoop so you
don't waste a lot of batter. I found (not having known this
previously) that the adaptation I did of the Markham recipe (which I
believe is in the Florithingy) makes exactly four dozen wafers with a
five-inch iron and a #40 scoop.

Hmmmm. To sandwich them with chocolate ganache or not to sandwich
them. That is the question...

Adamantius


Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 13:54:09 -0600 (CST)
From: "Pixel, Goddess and Queen" <pixel at hundred-acre-wood.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Pizzelle maker recommendations?
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

> Does anyone have recommendations for a particular brand or type of 
> pizzelle maker?
>
> - Doc

Check in the archives for the discussions on krumkake makers--they're
pretty much the same thing except different designs. I have a Villaware,
and I've been pretty happy with it. Not sure where it was bought from, as
it was a gift, but if I had to buy one that's what I'd get.

Margaret FitzWilliam


Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 15:42:03 EST
From: KristiWhyKelly at aol.com
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Pizzelle maker recommendations?
To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org

I've got three pizzelle irons.  One a Villaware, without the non stick
coating and two black and decker non sticks.

After making batches of 1600 to 400 wafers, I would recommend the Villaware
over the black and deckers.  The wafers come out faster, thinner and crisper
in the Villaware.  The cheaper (by half) black and deckers are more waffle
like and tend to absorb moisture faster.

The Villaware wafers are easier to roll into the cigar like rolls you read
about in the books as well.

Grace


Date: Thu, 12 May 2005 22:22:42 -0400
From: Johnna Holloway <johnna at sitka.engin.umich.edu>
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Wafers and ice cream cones
To: "mk-cooks at midrealm.org" <mk-cooks at midrealm.org>,	Cooks within the
	SCA <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>,	SCA_Subtleties at yahoogroups.com

Ivan Day has added an interesting new tidbit to
his account of wafers.

http://www.historicfood.com/Wafer.htm

Those that take Food History News will already be aware that
the ice cream cone has been traced back to an 1807 Regency print.
The news was published there in FHN 62 in 2004.
Ivan Day now includes that information on his site.
http://www.historicfood.com/Ice%20Cream%20Cone.htm

Johnnae


Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2006 17:30:08 -0500
From: "Michael Gunter" <countgunthar at hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Pizzelles
To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org

> So, any interesting recipe or equipment?  What are you serving them  
> with?

> Selene

For my Coronation feast in Atenveldt we served them standing
up in dishes of Creme Boyled with a touch of strawberry
coulis. It's a very nice combo.

Gunthar


Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2006 06:56:58 -0500
From: Johnna Holloway <johnna at sitka.engin.umich.edu>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Just suppose... pre-1600 wafer patterns
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

> I still don't remember it having anything on the patterns on period
> wafer irons, though. I'd love to get such info though. 
>
> Stefan

Short note--
Check out http://www.historicfood.com/Wafer.htm
for what Ivan Day has on wafers, inc. his irons.

Victoria and Albert's collection is searchable so you can look at
their collection via the web.

I have slides of early wafer irons from Belgium, but I can't tell
you when they were made right now. They were in a museum in Bruges.

Johnnae


Date: Sun, 04 Mar 2007 17:32:21 -0500
From: Johnna Holloway <johnna at sitka.engin.umich.edu>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Orange flavored wafers ( was RE: Pomegranate
	and Onion	Juice)
To: grizly at mindspring.com, Cooks within the SCA
	<sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

The recipe actually says "You can also use fresh orange or lemon zest
and fresh orange or lemon juice."
It's a recipe that one can tinker with. A number of the original wafer
recipes, especially the Italian ones, are very vague in their measurements.
Mistress Helewyse translated one of Scappi's wafer recipes

It reads in translation
_To make wafers with crumb of bread and sugar_.
Take crumb of bread and let it moisten in cold water and strain it
through a sieve. Make a paste of it and wheat flour, rosewater and sugar
and simple water and fresh egg yolks. Because otherwise you won't be
able to make wafers make the paste liquid and firm. When you have the
irons add a little malmsey wine, and make the wafers.
If you want it with pulp of capons boiled in water and salt. Paste this
meat in a mortar and temper with a little cold water and pass with the
bread crumb through the sieve and mix together with the other things and
make wafers. One can also make with almond milk and egg yolks. Scappi
Cap CXLI, folio 420, book 6.

Johnnae


Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2007 00:28:34 -0500
From: ranvaig at columbus.rr.com
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] savory wafers
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

>  However,
> I tried one of the savory wafer recipes once, and was less than happy
> with the results. This was one with cheese and it tended to ooze
> where it shouldn't and burn and simply be rather messy.

Try using something like Indian paneer, which doesn't melt.  There
were fresh cheeses like that in period too.  The "frying" cheese that
has been talked about in here might work too.

Ranvaig


Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2007 06:54:54 -0500
From: Johnna Holloway <johnna at sitka.engin.umich.edu>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Orange flavored wafers ( was RE: Pomegranate
	and Onion Juice)
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

If you want them to be orange flavored try a combination
of fresh orange zest, some fresh orange juice and possibly add
either orange oil or a good quality orange extract.
I use the Boyajian citrus oils myself.
http://www.boyajianinc.com/citrus.html

You'll have to experiment by baking one and then seeing what the taste
is like as the taste of the finished wafer will be different than the
raw batter.

Orange flowered water can be cloying; I'd only use it in very small
amounts for perhaps delicate thin wafers.
You mentioned doing cinnamon and orange. You might want to try baking
just cinnamon in  half a batch and flavoring the other batch with the
orange. Then compare the two. Cloves (freshly ground) works well.

Johnna


Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 10:31:57 -0500
From: "Terry Decker" <t.d.decker at worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] waffles/holhippen
To: "Cooks within the SCA" <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

> http://www.waffelbar.de/Waffelgeschichte.html
>
> http://tinyurl.com/36gnv9 (Google translation)
>
> This is a German language site that lists names for waffles in
> various locations.  Apparently holhippen is a type of waffle or
> wafer.  In Rumpolt it is wrapped around a roller.
>
> Ranvaig

Think about the pronunciation, "hohl" means hollow or concave. "Hippe" is a
scythe or sickle (crescent shape) and is a colloquial name for croissant.
Applied to a wafer, I would expect it to be a crescent-shaped, empty shell,
probably for filling.

Bear (who only took a couple years of seeing the word to think of that)


Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2007 21:30:36 -0400
From: Johnna Holloway <johnna at sitka.engin.umich.edu>
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Wafer Irons dated 1481
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

Back in December 2006 there was a great deal of discussion
about surviving examples of pre 1600 wafer irons.
I have come across an example on page 114 of the new volume
At Home in Renaissance Italy. It's the V&A catalogue of their exhibit.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1487_renaissance/index.html

Wafering Irons, Umbria 1481
17.3 cm
It's part of the V&A collection but is not included in the collection that
can be searched on the website. At least the accession numbers and searching
under the subject doesn't turn them up.

Johnnae


Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2007 15:39:28 -0400
From: "Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius" <adamantius1 at verizon.net>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Obleys and Wafers
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

On Jun 15, 2007, at 1:32 PM, Suey wrote:
> What is the difference? I thought they were the same.
> Suey

Generally speaking, they're similar. It can become confusing when
either term is borrowed from one language into another, or when a
translator decides for whatever reason to use one term or the other.
Speaking _very_ generally, and I'm sure there will be exceptions, I'd
say the main difference is that sometimes obleys/oubleys refers to a
form of offertory or sacrificial cake (I think this is from a Greek
word denoting exactly such a cake), that could be offered to a god on
an altar (presumably burnt) or to the god's priests to eat. Sometimes
obley also refers to the Christian communion bread, which is also
often, but not always, a wafer. I'm not certain that obleys are
always cooked between two irons, while wafers pretty much are,
without exception, as far as I know. I believe I've seen recipes for
obleys that are cooked between irons are which are probably
functionally identical to wafers, but I've also seen lots of
references to obleys where we have no such assurance; for all I know
they could be baked in the hearth ashes wrapped in a leaf or
something like that.

Again, very generally, I think most English-speaking people
interested in history or food history probably think of obleys as a
small cake which may or may not have a religious significance,
whereas a wafer generally would not have an assumed religious
connotation, unless specifically qualified by saying, for example,
"communion wafer".

I'd say that in general, the terms are often assumed to be
interchangeable, but in fact probably not 100% identical. It probably
depends on the culture you're dealing with.

Adamantius


Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2007 22:46:48 -0400
From: Suey <lordhunt at gmail.com>
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Obleys and Wafers
To: sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org

> Adamantius wrote:
> Generally speaking, they're similar. It can become confusing when
> either term is borrowed from one language into another, or when a
> translator decides for whatever reason to use one term or the other.

Right oh, the Spanish translation of obleys today would be "barquillos"
in my book. People are surprised at that as they are round when I tell
them that. I explain,  no they are no more than rolled "obleas". They
reply ok like if say so. . . but then I have never met a Spanish
authority in cookery.

>  . . .sometimes obleys/oubleys refers to a
> form of offertory or sacrificial cake (I think this is from a Greek
> word denoting exactly such a cake), that could be offered to a god on
> an altar (presumably burnt) or to the god's priests to eat.

Ok sounds logical does anyone happen to have the Greek around my little
Websters does not even have the word? Nor can I find the etymology for
it online.

> obley also refers to the Christian communion bread, which is also
> often, but not always, a wafer.. .I'm not certain that obleys are
> always cooked between two irons, while wafers pretty much are

     I was waiting for you to answer that one cause I read your article
on internet! I found another definition which says obleys "are a type of
wafer" because it goes on to say they can be baked instead of cooked in
irons. Nola bakes his. Sent Sovi does not explain it just includes them
in a couple of recipes calling for them.

     Assuming that is a more precise way to explain this item I am
researching wafers as best I can. Now I can't find details on the
English wafers but good castles and palaces had them in the Middle Ages
had them which consisted of a department of wafers as staff and a room
apart from the kitchen.  I think it was in Westminster Palace where the
wafery was on the other side of the hall from the kitchen. Would that
indicate that there was no chimney there so irons had to be used? How
English were wafers cooked? We certainly have so many tons of wafers in
Westminster and on the London streets in Edward IV's time that they are
supposed to be the blame of Edward IV's weight gain during his second
term as king.

Suey


Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2007 01:37:14 -0400
From: "Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius" <adamantius1 at verizon.net>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Obleys and Wafers
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

On Jun 15, 2007, at 10:46 PM, Suey wrote:
>> Adamantius wrote:
>> Generally speaking, they're similar. It can become confusing when
>> either term is borrowed from one language into another, or when a
>> translator decides for whatever reason to use one term or the other.
>>
> Right oh, the Spanish translation of obleys today would be "barquillos"
> in my book. People are surprised at that as they are round when I tell
> them that. I explain,  no they are no more than rolled "obleas". They
> reply ok like if say so. . . but then I have never met a Spanish
> authority in cookery.

It is sometimes very easy to fall into a logical trap which says that
when two things have certain common characteristics, they are the
same thing. Remember our  ...animated... discussion of hamburgers,
where I was trying to explain that two different foods can have some
characteristics in common, and a translator can even assign the same
name to the two items even if it was not originally intended they be
identified as the same thing: this is often a matter of convenience
for the translator or author, and to be honest, not all manuscript
scholars know very much about food, so it's easy to fall into these
little traps. I don't know enough about oubleys to say if they're a
type of wafer; maybe wafers are a type of oubley, or they are two
different types of some unidentified third item.

>>  . . .sometimes obleys/oubleys refers to a
>> form of offertory or sacrificial cake (I think this is from a Greek
>> word denoting exactly such a cake), that could be offered to a god on
>> an altar (presumably burnt) or to the god's priests to eat.
> Ok sounds logical does anyone happen to have the Greek around my little
> Websters does not even have the word? Nor can I find the etymology for
> it online.

Heh. You're going to laugh. At the moment the best I can do is give
you what The Larousse Gastronomique says. Not the best information,
perhaps, but a start, maybe:

> Oublie
>
> A small flat or cornet shaped wafer, widely enjoyed in France in
> the Middle Ages, but whose origins go even further back in time.
> Oublies, which were perhaps the first cakes in the history of
> cooking, are the ancestors of waffles. They were usually made from
> a rather thick waffle batter and were cooked in flat round finely
> patterned iron moulds. Some authorities consider that the name
> comes from the Greek obelios, meaning a cake cooked between two
> iron plates and sold for an obol; others that it comes from the
> Latin oblata  (offering), which also means an unconsecrated host.
>
> In the Middle Ages, oublies were made by the oubloyeurs (or
> oublieux), whose guild was incorporated in 1270. They made and sold
> their wares in the open street, setting up stalls at fairs and in
> the open space in front of churches on feast days. It was said that
> the most celebrated oublies were those from Lyon, where ap parently
> they were rolled into cornets af ter being cooked. The oubloyeurs
> would put them one inside the other and sell them in fives, called
> a main d'oublies. Often they would play dice for them with their
> customers or draw lots for them on a 'Wheel of Fortune', which was
> in fact the cover of the large pannier ? or coffin ? in which
> they carried their wares. By the 16th century most of the Parisian
> pas trycooks were established in the Rue des Oubloyers in the Cit?;
> by night and day the apprentices would set out laden with their
> panniers full of nieules  (round flat  cakes), ?chaud?s (a sort of
> brioche). oublies, and other small cakes, crying "Voila le plaisir,
> mesdames!'' (?Here's pleasure, ladies!''), which led to oublies
> being given the popular name of plaisirs. The last of these pedlars
> disappeared after World War I.
>
> oublies a la parisienne
>
> Put 250 g (9 oz, 2 1/4 cups) sifted flour, 150 g (5 oz, 2/3 cup)
> sugar, 2 eggs, and a little orange flower water or lemon juice into
> a bowl. Work together until everything is well mixed, then
> gradually add 6?7 dl (1 pint, 2 cups) milk, 65 g (2 1/2 oz, 5
> tablespoons) melted butter, and the grated rind of a lemon. Heat
> the oublie iron and grease it evenly; pour in 1 tablespoon batter
> and cook over a high heat, turning the iron over halfway through.
> Peel the wafer off the iron and either roll it into a cornet around
> a wooden cone or leave it flat.

Again, I can't vouch for the accuracy of any of this, I can only
report what it says. This is the 1985 American edition, edited by
Jennifer Harvey Lang.

>> obley also refers to the Christian communion bread, which is also
>> often, but not always, a wafer.. .I'm not certain that obleys are
>> always cooked between two irons, while wafers pretty much are
>     I was waiting for you to answer that one cause I read your article
> on internet! I found another definition which says obleys "are a type of
> wafer" because it goes on to say they can be baked instead of cooked in
> irons. Nola bakes his. Sent Sovi does not explain it just includes them
> in a couple of recipes calling for them.
>     Assuming that is a more precise way to explain this item I am
> researching wafers as best I can. Now I can't find details on the
> English waferys but good castles and palaces had them in the Middle Ages
> had them which consisted of a department of wafers as staff and a room
> apart from the kitchen.  I think it was in Westminster Palace where the
> wafery was on the other side of the hall from the kitchen. Would that
> indicate that there was no chimney there so irons had to be used? How
> English were wafers cooked? We certainly have so many tons of wafers in
> Westminster and on the London streets in Edward IV's time that they are
> supposed to be the blame of Edward IV's weight gain during his second
> term as king.

As far as I can tell, there are some early French and English
references to both oubleys and wafers (I think there are wafer
recipes in either Taillevent or Le Menagier, but I'm not in a
position to check that right now), and there's a reference to wafers
in both The Forme of Cury (and also Chiquart's Du Fait de Cuisine) as
an ingredient in other dishes: FoC calls for them (or wide pasta
losenges) as a substrate for a hare stew, and Chiquart as an
ingredient in his tourtes parmerienne, to separate the layers of pie
filling. I _believe_ the first written English recipe may be this one
from Harleian 279, later published in Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-
Books:

> .xxiiij. Waffres.--Take ?e Wombe of A luce, & se?e here wyl, & do
> it on a morter, & tender chese ?er-to, grynde hem y-fere; ?an take
> flowre an whyte of Eyroun & bete to-gedere, ?en take Sugre an
> pouder of Gyngere, & do al to-gederys, & loke ?at ?in Eyroun ben
> hote, & ley ?er-on of ?in paste, & ?an make ?in waffrys, & serue
> yn.

You're taking some not-well-specified internal organ of a pike,
probably the stomach or swim bladder, I suspect, rather than the hard
roe or ovaries of the female, boiling and pounding them -- I suspect
for the gelatin content -- adding soft cheese, flour, egg whites,
sugar and powdered ginger, and making a thick batter, which you then
bake between hot irons. Note that the spelling of eyroun, meaning
eggs, and eyroun, meaning irons, is identical here. I don't recall
seeing that elsewhere.

Incidentally, folks, on a tangential note: since I've once or twice
been asked the question, "what exactly is that Concordance of English
Recipes by Constance Hieatt, Johnna Holloway, et al, good for," I can
state that this is what it's good for: finding out where (as in what
source) recipes for various English medieval dishes come from. It is,
in part, an index to every English medieval cookbook we know about.
You still need the sources, but it's an extremely valuable
navigational tool.

Suey, if you read an article by me on wafers (did I write an article
on wafers???), I'm guessing you saw mention of my favorite English
period wafer recipe, which is from Gervase Markham's The English Hus-
Wife. It's somewhat later in period than some others, but still quite
recognizably a wafer.

Adamantius


Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2007 13:46:19 -0500
From: "Elise Fleming" <alysk at ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Obleys, wafers, barquillos and nieules
To: "sca-cooks at ansteorra.org" <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

Okay... To add to the roiling confusion... Suey wrote:

> The point is what would be the proper name for barquillos in English?
> Now a Spaniard just reminded me that in church we are given
> 'ostias' during communion and we eat ostias or barquillos in the home
> with ice cream in particular today which are store bought and most
> popularly known as barquillos. What are wafers in Spanish she  
> queried? I
> just looked it up they are: barquillos or ostias as per my Cassell's
> bilingual dictionary! Neither obleys nor ostias appear in that  
> dictionary.
> A Spanish recipe for ostias consists of one kilo of flour mixed with
> lots of water to make a very runny batter. Drop one tablespoon on the
> iron and press until toasted. Now why doesn't the church make wafers
> like that? Oops now you caught again. I can't say wafers anymore  
> without
> abusing the Queen's English?
> (Now just to add confusion to all this in Nola's original Castellan
> translation we have a recipe for Ostias with an accent on the i. Lady
> Brighid translates that as oysters. Iranzo in her modern translation
> into Castellan is more definite in her index saying ostias from the  
> sea.
> Dog gone it I was so excited when I saw the word ostias.)

"Barquillo" (both Cassell and Velazquez) is defined as "a thin rolled
wafer".  "Barquilla" is the conical mould for wafers, among other
definitions.  Going backwards from English to Spanish, "wafer" is "oblea",
"hostia" or "barquillo", according to Velazquez and Cassell.  Since the "h"
is silent in Spanish, it might be "misspelled" as "ostia", no accent mark.
There is no entry for "ostia" because the word should be "hostia".  (Think
"host".)

  "Oyster" is "ostra", not "ostia", unless there was an ancient spelling
that doesn't appear in modern Spanish dictionaries.  "Ostio'n" (accent mark
on the "o") is a "large oyster".  "Ostra" is Catalan for oyster, as well.
(It also means "bloody h*ll" as well!)  I cannot find any "osti'a" at all.
That doesn't mean that it didn't exist in the Middle Ages, but maybe it was
someone's misspelling???

> Now I think we are cooking Sent Sovi and Nola use the words neules,
> nelles in their recipes which I have been calling wafers as per Lady
> Brighid in her translation of Nola's recipe: 91.

My Catalan-English dictionary gives "neula" as "rolled wafer biscuit".  It
is possible that in our time period that it could have been spelled
differently as cited above.

Alys Katharine


Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2007 20:16:57 -0400
From: Suey <lordhunt at gmail.com>
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Obleys, wafers, barquillos and nieules
To: sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org

In reference to my queries and Adamtius' replies in messages vols 14
Issue 29 and 14 Issue 30 I am very grateful for all his replies although
I think I am becoming more confused every day but I am working to try to
sort my mind out if that is possible. In particular I am grateful for
pointing out to me pay attention to the Harleian 279 recipe which I
brushed over until now.

     Now talking about "barquillos" and wondering how to translate the
item. A recipe for them is:
Ingredients:
15 g butter
2 egg whites
50 g butter
50 g flour
100 g powdered sugar
2 o 3 g vanilla

Preparation:
Heat the oven and grease the cookie sheets with melted butter. Put the
egg whites in a bowl, add the sugar and beat until the mixture is spongy
but not stiff.
     Melt 50 g butter, sift the flour, mix these ingredients and slowly
add the egg whites and  the vanilla.
     Place the bater on the cookie sheets with a tablespoon distributing
it in rectangles. Heat 7 to 8  minutes until  toasted.
     Let it sit 2 or 3 seconds. Very carefully remove them from the sheet
with a sharp knife or a thin spatula to prevent breaking. Put the
rectangles on a smooth surface. Place a pencil at one end of a rectangle
lengthwise and roll the rectangle around the pencil making it look like
a cigarette. Place it on a rack to cool.

     (By the way the recipe is the same as that for thin almond cookies,
"tejas" in Spanish, "tuelle" in  French with the addition of chopped
almonds. They are not rolled with a pencil but pressed around the knee
of the baker which explains why different batches have different degrees
of roundness in different bakeries.)

     The point is what would be the proper name for barquillos in  
English?

      Now a Spaniard just reminded me that in church we are given
'ostias' during communion and we eat ostias or barquillos in the home
with ice cream in particular today which are store bought and most
popularly known as barquillos. What are wafers in Spanish she queried? I
just looked it up they are: barquillos or ostias as per my Cassell's
bilingual dictionary! Neither obleys nor ostias appear in that  
dictionary.

     A Spanish recipe for ostias consists of one kilo of flour mixed with
lots of water to make a very runny batter. Drop one tablespoon on the
iron and press until toasted. Now why doesn't the church make wafers
like that? Oops now you caught again. I can't say wafers anymore without
abusing the Queen's English?

     (Now just to add confusion to all this in Nola's original Castellan
translation we have a recipe for Ostias with an accent on the i. Lady
Brighid translates that as oysters. Iranzo in her modern translation
into Castellan is more definite in her index saying ostias from the sea.
Dog gone it I was so excited when I saw the word ostias.)

     Now you quote from The Larousse Gastronomique:

> . . .night and day the apprentices would set out laden with their
>> panniers full of nieules  (round flat  cakes), ?chaud?s (a sort of
>> brioche). oublies, and other small cakes, crying "Voila le plaisir,
>> mesdames!

Now I think we are cooking Sent Sovi and Nola use the words neules,
nelles in their recipes which I have been calling wafers as per Lady
Brighid in her translation of Nola's recipe:  91. MARZIPANS FOR INVALIDS
WHO HAVE LOST THE DESIRE TO EAT, VERY GOOD AND OF GREAT SUSTENENCE which
I also translate as wafers. Did we mess up that translation too? Is
there a word for nieules in English?

     The article I read in which obleys and wafers are mentioned is in
Crown Touney Feast, www.ostgardr.org/cooking/crown.xxxiiihtml

     Did you did not write that? It appears to be so Master?
Suey


Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2007 12:16:04 -0700 (PDT)
From: Marcus Loidolt <mjloidolt at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Obleys, wafers, barquillos and nieules
To: alysk at ix.netcom.com, Cooks within the SCA
	<sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

But the Western Church does indeed, still make the host, ie wafer  
just the way you describe it, in fact it must be made that way by  
Roman Canon Law, #924-926 describes, using only pure wheat flour and  
water, unleavened, pressed into a proper shape.

   Johann

Elise Fleming <alysk at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
<<<
>   A Spanish recipe for ostias consists of one kilo of flour mixed with
> lots of water to make a very runny batter. Drop one tablespoon on the
> iron and press until toasted.

   Now why doesn't the church make wafers like that?

   Alys Katharine >>>


Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2007 20:35:56 -0400
From: "Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius" <adamantius1 at verizon.net>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Obleys, wafers, etc
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

On Jun 17, 2007, at 7:19 PM, Suey wrote:
> Master Adamantius and Elsie Fleming, I thank you so much for your latest
> contribution to this muddle of mine.

I believe there was some contribution from Master Johann, among
others...

> That is beautiful what you just
> wrote Elsie about nieules! I am so excited! Hope will be pleased to know
> that I have reviewed today a few more of my files but might not be so
> pleased that I have come to the conclusion that wafers are like plants
> in that this is the title of a family name in English while in Spanish
> and French the family name still is obleys because in Spanish at least
> we have no name for wafers. Within that family wafers/obleys we have the
> species wafers, obleys, barquillos, nieules, chauds and other small
> cakes.
>     Austin in his Glossary and Index says Obleies and their various
> spellings are a wafer cake. . . sweetened. . . that serves for the
> bottoms of  Tartes and March-panes which concurs with Nolas nieules

I believe I recall a German recipe... is it in Ein Buoch Von Guter
Spise? which specifies wafers as a substrate for a marzipan tart, also.

> but Austin worries me because his gives page numbers for obley recipes
> which do not concur with page numbers in The Fifteenth Century Cookery for
> wafer references so I still have sticky differences in defining these
> species.

This is interesting. I can't find my hard copy of Two15CCB, and the
online versions seem to omit Austin's index. However, searching for
instances of obley-like word usage, I find two recipes that refer to
them, one for crusteroles and one for fritters, calling for dough
rolled to the size of an oblie, and for apples to be sliced as thin
as an oblie, respectively. In both cases, Austin includes a
parenthetical note to the effect that oblies are sacramental wafers.
Not "they resemble", or are a form of. Are. Which, as I say, if he
says elsewhere that they're a sweetened wafer cake, I think is a bit
odd.

> Why did Johnna have to go away? Where is our Lady Brighid?

Either they're both terrible people with misplaced priorities, or
else they're both supremely lovely ladies taking some well-deserved
time away from this list and the many contributions they've made
here, s**t happens, and patience is a divine virtue. I'm leaning
toward the latter.

> Thank heavens the rest of you are around to help me as you can!
>     Interesting your comment Elsie on barquillos because Covarrubias
> cites obleys as a very thin pastry made in the form of a rectangle as
> clothes covering the coffin of the dead. Barquillos he goes to say are
> twisted obleys. Humm I always thought my buddy Ned IV of England
> fattened himself on round wafers.

Just out of curiosity, what's your source for that little factoid? I
ask because there's a piece of probable culinary fakelore from the
15th century to the effect that a recipe for Shrewsbury cakes fell
out of the pocket of Richard III into the mud at Bosworth Field (this
is probably a 19th-century fabrication).

> Do we have country differences here cause the French have cornets?

<shrug> It seems many cultures have noticed that when you have a
floppy cake that crisps as it cools (the inclusion of plenty of sugar
is often a big factor there), you can form them while warm into
various shapes. I believe there's another reference in Larousse, in
an article on street vendor's traditional calls (I think the article
is entitled "Street Cries of Paris"), which refers to wafers being
simply stacked while slightly warm and impaled on a skewer, which the
vendor carries over his head like a distaff. I always wanted to serve
wafers that way at an event. But then, I also wanted to carve meat
onto platters from a spit held in my left hand, too. Oh, to be young
[er] again...

Adamantius


Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2007 23:58:40 -0400
From: Robin Carroll-Mann <rcmann4 at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Obleys, wafers, etc
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

I consulted my facsimile edition of de Nola.  The word in recipe 91
(marzipans for invalids) that I translated as "wafer" is "oblea".

I then dug out my micro-printed edition of Covarrubias 1609 "Tesoro De
La Lengua Castellena" (whose print seems to have shrunk further in the
years since I purchased it).  He defines "oblea" as a leaf of very thin
dough.  Oblea which are half twisted (medio torcidas) as called
"barquillos".  Those made "en ca?utos" (in tubes? in the form of tubes")
so that they are very folded (muy plegadas) are called "supplicaciones".

Alys Katharine, it may comfort you to know that Covarrubias says that
"ostia" or "ostion" are corrupted forms of "ostra" used by some people.
-- 
Brighid ni Chiarain
Barony of Settmour Swamp, East Kingdom


Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 09:38:28 -0500
From: "Elise Fleming" <alysk at ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Obleys, wafers, etc
To: "sca-cooks at ansteorra.org" <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

Adamantius wrote:
> I believe I recall a German recipe... is it in Ein Buoch Von Guter
> Spise? which specifies wafers as a substrate for a marzipan tart, also.

English sources also say to use wafers as a base for marchpanes.  May (The
Accomplisht Cook) says "...set an edge about it as you do a quodling tart,
and the bottom of wafers under it, thus bake it in an oven or
baking-pan..."  Same for Markham (1615 - The English Housewife) - "...then
with a rolling-pin roll it forth, and lay it upon wafers washed with
rose-water..."  Same for Murrell (1617 - A Daily Exercise for Ladies and
Gentlewomen) - "...make a bottome to it with Wafers..."

Alys Katharine


Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 22:42:14 -0400
From: Suey <lordhunt at gmail.com>
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Obleys, wafers etc
To: sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org

   Adamantius wrote:
> I believe the first written English recipes may be this one from  
> Harleian 279 later published in Two Fifteenth Centruy Cookery Books.

The one quoted is in Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books, Harleian 279,
p 39, No 24 in Austin?s 1888 edition.

> However, searching for
> instances of obley-like word usage, I find two recipes that refer to
> them, one for crusteroles and one for fritters, calling for dough
> rolled to the size of an oblie, and for apples to be sliced as thin
> as an oblie, respectively. In both cases, Austin includes a
> parenthetical note to the effect that oblies are sacramental wafers.
> Not "they resemble", or are a form of. Are. Which, as I say, if he
> says elsewhere that they're a sweetened wafer cake, I think is a bit
> odd.

Crutse rolles are in Harleian MS 279 on p. 46, No 61 and Frutours is in
Harleian MS 3016 on p. 73 with no number.

> Just out of curiosity, what's your source for that little factoid? I
> ask because there's a piece of probable culinary fakelore from the
> 15th century to the effect that a recipe for Shrewsbury cakes fell
> out of the pocket of Richard III into the mud at Bosworth Field (this
> is probably a 19th-century fabrication).

Blast have spent the day going through the files I have on disks trying
to find where I got the info the Ned IV over indulged in wafers. It must
be in a book I haven't brought from the other apartment yet. As he over
indulged in everything else why no wafers?

     Lady Brighid welcome back and thanks for sharing Covarrubias 1609
version, mine is from 1943. You quote:

". . . Oblea which are half twisted (medio torcidas) as called
"barquillos". Those made "en ca?utos" (in tubes? in the form of tubes")
so that they are very folded (muy plegadas) are called "supplicaciones". . ."
In Don Quijote Part II Cap 47 we have canutillos de supplicaciones when
the doctor tells Sancho Panza:

  . . . que ha de comer el senor gobernador ahora, para conservar su
salud y corroborarla, es un ciento de cautillos de suplicaciones y unas
tajadicas subtiles de carne de membrillo, que le asienten el estomago y
le ayuden a la digesti?n. .  .

   . . .what his worship the governor should eat now to preserve and
strength his health and are obleys and some slices of quince that will
sooth his stomach and help his digestion. . . .

They also appear on the menu of the meal Philip II gave to to the
Portuguese in 1580. My understanding is the term "suplicaciones" is
obsolete today but that they bent (another meaning of plegar) or rolled,
i.e. barquillos today.

 Suey


Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 23:36:06 -0400
From: ranvaig at columbus.rr.com
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Obleys, wafers, etc
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

> I believe I recall a German recipe... is it in Ein Buoch Von Guter
> Spise? which specifies wafers as a substrate for a marzipan tart,  
> also.

There are also recipes for sour cherry and other fillings between two  
wafers.  I'll take a look tomorrow and list them

Ranvaig


Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2007 01:08:59 -0400
From: "Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius" <adamantius1 at verizon.net>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Obleys, wafers etc
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

On Jun 18, 2007, at 10:42 PM, Suey wrote:
> Crutse rolles are in Harleian MS 279 on p. 46, No 61 and Frutours
> is in Harleian MS 3016 on p. 73 with no number.

Yes, I realize that, but my point was that I could not find a recipe
for oubleys in the Austin edition of those manuscripts. Just
references and the one recipe for wafers.

>     I am still stuck on the French nieules don't we have a word for
> them in English or Spanish? Suey

Maybe the cake doesn't occur in Spain or England? For whatever
reason, France seems to have so many regional foods that are
completely different from what is eaten 20 miles away; I don't know
if this is the case elsewhere, but between town and village
specialties that cannot be legally produced elsewhere under that
name, rivalries between municipalities, different dialects, etc., it
may help not to look at these nieules as being a "French" thing, but
as a specialty of the town of X. Further, is it not possible that
there may be no counterpart elsewhere in France, let alone Spain and
England?

Here's (again) what Larousse says about nieules, for what it's worth:

"NIEULE

"A small round cake with fluted edges from Flanders, made with flour,
milk, a little butter, eggs, and sugar. In Moeurs populaires de la
Flandre francaise (1889). Desrousseaux describes neiules as 'pastries
shaped like large Communion wafers, made in a waffle iron' and says
that they were made on feast days all over Flanders. The town of
Armentieres claims to have originated nieules: in 1510, when Jacques,
Duke of Luxembourg and lord of the town, was presiding at a banquet,
he went out onto the balcony and threw the remains of a great cake to
the children of the town. The event was such a success that it became
an annual custom known as the 'Feast of Nieules'. The name is derived
from the Spanish word, ?olas, meaning crumbs -- at that time,
Flanders was ruled by Spain. The tradition survived until 1832, then
fell into disuse. In 1938 Pierre Baudin, a pastrycook of the town,
revived the custom for the carnival."

Adamantius


Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2007 07:16:08 -0500
From: "Elise Fleming" <alysk at ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Obleys, wafers etc
To: "sca-cooks at ansteorra.org" <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

Suey wrote:
> . . que ha de comer el senor gobernador ahora, para conservar su
> salud y corroborarla, es un ciento de cautillos de suplicaciones y unas
> tajadicas subtiles de carne de membrillo, que le asienten el  
> estomago y le ayuden a la digesti?n. . .
>
> . . .what his worship the governor should eat now to preserve and
> strength his health and are obleys and some slices of quince that will
> sooth his stomach and help his digestion. . . .
>
> They also appear on the menu of the meal Philip II gave to to the
> Portuguese in 1580. My understanding is the term "suplicaciones" is
> obsolete today but that they bent (another meaning of plegar) or  
> rolled, i.e. barquillos today.

The Velazquez dictionary gives "rolled waffle" as one of the meanings of
"suplicacio'n" - if this will add to the confusion!  No listing for
"cautillo".  The "-illo" ending sometimes makes a diminuitive.  Out of
curiosity, who translated "un ciento de cautillos de suplicaciones" as
"obleys"?  What happened to "ciento" which means either "hundred" or  
"one hundredth"?  (I suspect it is the latter??)

Alys Katharine


Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2007 13:47:51 -0400
From: Suey <lordhunt at gmail.com>
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Obleys, wafers etc
To: sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org

I wrote:
>> Crutse rolles are in Harleian MS 279 on p. 46, No 61 and Frutours
>> is in Harleian MS 3016 on p. 73 with no number.

Adamantius replied:

> Yes, I realize that, but my point was that I could not find a recipe
> for oubleys in the Austin edition of those manuscripts. Just
> references and the one recipe for wafers.

     Yes, I see but I think Austin that by only citing Cruste Rolle and
Frutours in the Glossary and Index on page 138 under Obleies means that
there is no recipe under the word obleys in these manuscripts. It seems
that for lack of recipes we are not finding evidence that can
substantiate Colin Clair statement that obleys are a kind of wafer or
Hieatt who says they are wafers. At another point she states that in Le
Menagier there are five ways to make wafers. Is she talking about
gaufrettes (wafers), oublies or tarts?  (I do not have direct access to
French documentation.) Then James Matterer in his entry for wafres
concerning Canterbury Tales comments that wafers had several popular
names including: cialdone, nevole, nelles, neules, lozanges, oublies,
hosties, waifurs, wafron and wastel.

     I find the same in Spanish as obleas seem to have various popular
names and offspring such as the teja or almond cookie as indicated in
previous SCA food messages on this subject. It would seem to me that
England the family name obleys was replaced with the Dutch name wafel,
coming from Middle Low German with the Norman invasions while in France
and Spain it remained obleys.

Suey


Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2007 14:07:01 -0400
From: Suey <lordhunt at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Obleys, wafers etc
To: sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org

Elise Fleming wrote:
> The Velazquez dictionary gives "rolled waffle" as one of the meanings of
> "suplicacio'n" - if this will add to the confusion!  No listing for
> "cautillo".  The "-illo" ending sometimes makes a diminuitive.  Out of
> curiosity, who translated "un ciento de cautillos de suplicaciones" as
> "obleys"?  What happened to "ciento" which means either "hundred"  
> or "one hundredth"?  (I suspect it is the latter??)

Sorry, first of all there is a typo here it is not "cautillo" but
cantillo (little tube). In my edition of Don Quijote the commentaries
are by Luis Astrana Marin who states in footnote 20 of that chapter,
page 1798 that "these are very thin tubes made with "hostias" or
"barquillos". Yeah in my haste mail the message last night I
inadvertently omitted the word "ciento". To me it means the doctor is
telling Sancho Panza  to eat 100 barquillos. Also I just said quince
that's incorrect in this case I think membrillo refers to quince jelly
not just plain quince.

Suey


Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2007 20:15:24 +0000
From: Olwen the Odd <olwentheodd at hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Hare in Papdele
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

I have successfully made and kept wafers in advance without them  
wilting by popping them out of the wafer maker (mine makes two round  
ones at a time) and once I am done with a batch I stack them up in a  
beverage cooler (like this type http://www.igloocoolers.com/products/ 
Consumer/SoftSides/PersonalBeverage/168/ ) where they stack snuggly  
enough to avoid breakage also.  Mine lasted two days in the coolers.   
I had different flavors and put them in different coolers with labels.

Olwen

<<< I had planned on just cooking a wide lasagne pasta but maybe  
I'll somehow get adventurious and try cheese wafres. I have a wafre  
maker at home and there are probably more in the area. It will  
depend on how much more work I'm going to need to do for the feast.  
They might even be made on site.

Gunthar >>>


Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2010 20:59:38 -0700 (PDT)
From: wheezul at canby.com
To: sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org
Subject: [Sca-cooks] On Nattes

I think I have more questions than answers!

Basically these are layered skins from evaporated milk layered with sugar,
rosewater and wafers.  The first question I have is about the name of the
dish "Nattes".  I don't quite know if I can translate this - maybe someone
here knows.  To naetschen is the Swiss vernacular for making a popping
sound when opening one's mouth.  A Natter is an adder.  Nett is a net.  I
wonder if nett could have a wider meaning of a cover or blanket.  Then the
name would make sense, but I can't see how net would apply to the final
product otherwise.  However the word bestrichen does mean to cover with a
net as well.  Maybe it's like a "Nonne" (nun) and is just a name.

The next question is about wafers - ablaten/oblaten in this case.  I know
that they refer to unleavened communion wafers and are still available for
baking German lebkuchen.  It's used a with a little variation in Wecker,
so I'm not sure they are always these and medievally appeared to mean some
sort of baked good (outside of a communion host).  However, Anna Wecker
also says that they are made from round flat irons and implies that one
may "find them" rather than "make them".  Further, a recipe in another
cookbook for filled oblaten specified that one should take care to make
sure that it stayed white before frying them.  So I'm leaning toward the
white wafer concept.  Does anyone have a period recipe for a communion
wafer?

Anyway, the recipe with the German without the diacritcal marks:

Von Nattes
Mann thut sechs oder sieben stubichen
Milch in einen Messingskessel / lests fuenff oder sechs
mahl auffsieden vnd scheumets alzeit rein ab / gibt sie
darnach in etzliche Erdenescheusseln so wirdt oben eine
haut darauff / die sol man abnehment vnnd leggen sie
eine auff die ander in Confect schalen oder Silber
besprenget sie mit Rosenwasser oder Zucker vnnd be-
stricht sie mit Ablaten / seud dan die Milch fuenff oder
sechs mahl wider auff / das thut man offt vnd nimbts
allwege die haut davon vnd bestrewet eine jede dann-
wenn man sie in die Confectschalen legt mit Rosen-
wasser vnd Zucker / besticht sie mit Ablaten / etc.

About Nattes
One does six or seven stubichen [liquid measure]
[of] milk in a brass kettle / let it five or six
times come to a boil and skim [it] up clean all the time / give it
next in some earthenware bowls so it will on the top
a skin thereon [develop] / this should one take up and lay it
one on the other in a confect dish or silver [dish]
sprinkle it with rose water or sugar and cover
them with wafers / bring to a boil then the milk five or
six times again / that one does repeatedly and takes
each time the skin therefrom and bestrews each one then
when one lays them in the confect dish with rosewater
and sugar / cover it with wafers / etc.

Katherine

p.s. I'm having a bit of trouble reading the last couple letters in the
center gutter of my copy of the facsimile so if someone notes that the
words at the end aren't quite right, please let me know.


Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2010 00:04:49 -0700 (PDT)
From: wheezul at canby.com
To: "Cooks within the SCA" <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] On Nattes

In Anna Wecker's lovely recipe for almond waffles she tells us that waffle
irons are not smooth (and round) like the ones specifically for "oblaten"
and that waffle irons have designs engraved.  Weirdly though, most of the
extant 16th century irons are round and feature designs.  She also tells
one to regulate the thickness of the batter depending on the depth of the
waffle iron.

One of the tidbits I have run across about oblaten comes with my
experiments at baking lebkuchen.  Some traditional recipes bake modern
versions on "back-oblaten" which are thin white unseasoned wafers. 
Although I can't exactly call to mind - I think it was in a book on
lebkuchen molds maybe - I read that the practice was started by medieval
monks as the baking surface in the oven for the sticky honey-based baked
good.  No citation given though, as I recall.

Is the English word wafer a variant of the word waffle?  If so, maybe
wafer is not the best translation for the word oblaten.  They sound
positively nummy, at any rate!

Katherine


Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2010 08:03:06 -0500
From: "Terry Decker" <t.d.decker at att.net>
To: "Cooks within the SCA" <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] On Nattes

<<< Is the English word wafer a variant of the word waffle?  If so, maybe
wafer is not the best translation for the word oblaten.  They sound
positively nummy, at any rate!

Katherine >>>

In English, wafer to a thin crisp cake, biscuit or candy.  Ecclesiastically, 
it refers to the Eucharist, which is a thin disk of unleavened bread.  The 
word derives from Old French and is of Germanic origin.  A waffle is a light 
batter cake produced in a heated iron.  In practice, waffles are commonly 
thicker and softer than wafers.  The word derives from the Middle Dutch, 
wafel.  Since Oblate(n) is used to refer to the consecrated host, it is more 
correctly translated as wafer.  Wafer and waffle can both be translated as 
die Waffle.

Middle Dutch was used from the mid-12th through the 15th Centuries, so the 
origin of waffle is early enough.  Waffle is primarily used in U.S. English 
and only begins appear there in print in the very early 19th Century.  The 
spelling of die Waffle makes me think that it may have been adopted into 
German from English and is thus a modern artifact rather than one that might 
occur in the 15th or 16th Centuries.  So, waffle may be a poor choice of 
translation in most cases.

It does occur to me that I do not know the meaning of wafel (it might 
translate to wafer) and I do not have a Dutch-English dictionary available 
to me (translation programs do not handle variations in meaning or 
synonyms).  So hopefully someone working in the Dutch corpus can provide 
some enlightenment.

Bear 


Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2010 09:45:34 -0700 (PDT)
From: wheezul at canby.com
To: "Cooks within the SCA" <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] On Nattes

<<< Is the English word wafer a variant of the word waffle?  If so, maybe
wafer is not the best translation for the word oblaten.  They sound
positively nummy, at any rate!

Katherine >>>

In English, wafer to a thin crisp cake, biscuit or candy.
A waffle is a light batter cake produced in a heated iron.  In
practice, waffles are commonly thicker and softer than wafers.  The
word derives from the Middle Dutch,wafel.  Since Oblate(n) is used to
refer to the consecrated host, it is more correctly translated as
wafer.  Wafer and waffle can both be translated as die Waffle.

It does occur to me that I do not know the meaning of wafel (it might
translate to wafer) and I do not have a Dutch-English dictionary available
to me (translation programs do not handle variations in meaning or
synonyms).  So hopefully someone working in the Dutch corpus can provide
some enlightenment.

Bear
===========

Wecker refers to what I think of as waffles as:

"Ein ander form Goffern oder Eysenk?chlein"

So it seems that her word comes from the French gauffre - "gaufrer to
stamp or impress figures on cloth, paper, etc. with tools on which the
required pattern is cut" (from OED) which appears to have come into
English as the textile/hair tool - goffering irons.  I'm interested to
hear what might be known about the dutch.  There is an interesting entry
on Grimm's worterbuch for waffel and waffeleisen.  There seem to be
medieval forms of the word and it seems to be related to the word wave,
which makes sense.

Hmmm, in searching through Grimm's entry on oblaten, it seems to be
interchangeable with hippen which I do have a recipe for!  At least this
starts to give me some ideas.

"ein dunnes geback, flach oder zusammengerollt (= hippe th. 42, 1522,
vergl. oblatenrohrlein), schon im 13. jahrh. bezeugt: ein semel und zwei
obl?t. pfrundenordnung des klosters Geisenfeld 424; gefult obl?t. Germania
9, 201; nhd. oblaten oder hippen RADLEIN 487b; schweiz. ?blade, oflate,
offlete STAUB-TOBLER a. a. o.; oflaten, collyrae FRISIUS 249b; offleten,
huppen, crustulum 347b;"

Katherine


Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2010 19:02:49 -0700 (PDT)
From: wheezul at canby.com
To: "Cooks within the SCA" <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] On Nattes

<<< Natte means braid in French
--
Urtatim [that's err-tah-TEEM] >>>

It also means a "mat" as in a little carpet in French.  Now that makes
more sense to me.

Katherine


Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2010 21:01:51 -0700 (PDT)
From: wheezul at canby.com
To: "Cooks within the SCA" <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Subject: [Sca-cooks] More thoughts on Oblaten / Wafers Long - recipe

I've turned to the dictionary and Stainl's 1596 cookbook to try to make a
bit more headway as to the meaning.

The Grimm Dictionary and the Mittelhoch-deutsche Woerterbuch both use the
word hippe, which is the word for a wafer outside of a specific usage. 
There is also an occupation of a hippebaecker, which lends credence to
Anna Wecker instructions to get oblaten as large as one can get.

I'm very much interested in trying to understand the meaning of oblate(n)
in relationship to the recipes for filling them.  I'd like to at least
make an educated guess.

So in comes Staindl for more enlightenment.  He has recipes for 2 separate
kinds of filled oblaten.  One the older fig/raisin filling and the other a
spice mixture that has the word "Spicedulum" which seems in context an
apothocary preparation.  I haven't looked yet but I digress.

Immediately following the recipe for the filled oblate(n) comes the recipe
for holhippen, or rolled wafers. I thought I would share my translation so
far.  There is a reference I don't quite understand when the instructions
mention a salueteig.  So is this 'salve' as in salvation and Salve Regina
or 'salbei' as in sage?  It's not the first time I've seen this, I think,
but I can't see what would be special about a sage dough - maybe it is the
dough used for the host wafer because of it being used in the iron?

Another question I had was about the reference to bitter or sharp.  At
first I thought it might mean crisp, but then I couldn't find any evidence
of this in the dictionaries.  But as I thought on it if you let the sugar
wafer burn at all it does get bitter.  Is this line properly translated
for desire of bitterness, or a warning to not let it get overdone as the
next bit is about not letting the iron get too hot?

Staindl's rolled wafer recipe - diacritical marks replaced.

Von Holhippen am ersten
cxciiii
Mit Zucker bach es also / weich ein Zucker
ein / in ein lawes Wasser / das er zergeht /
vnnd mach einen teyg mit dem selben was-
ser / vnnd von waitzen meel / zeuech ihn fein
ab / gueuss immerzu eintzig / biss er dick wirt /
als ein duenner Saluenteig / nimb dann von
eim Ay oder zwey den dotter / ruer es darun-
der / vnd ein wenig zerlassen schmaltz / lass dann das Eysen er-
hitzen / geuess mit einem loeffel darauff / vndd trucks zu / hebs
vbers fewr / stip den teyg / darnach du es herb wilt haben /
misch offt / sich das eysen nit zu heiss werd / es verbrendt sich
sonst / die Ayrdotter machen sonst das gern ab dem Eysen
gehen.  Mit dem honig / nimb ein honig / thue es vndter ein
warms wasser / vnd treibs fein ab / wie oben steht / thue auch
ein dotter oder zwen darunder / sie gehn lieber vom eysen / die
mit dem zucker duerffen gar wol eylens / dann sie werden geh-
ling roesch / man mag zu zeyten honig vnd zucker durch einan-
der nemen / sie gehn auch gern vom eysen.

[This entry is #1 in book six]

On Rolled Wafers as the first [item]
CXCIIII
With sugar bake it thus / soften a sugar
whole / in a tepid water / that it dissolves /
and make a dough with the same wat-
er / and from wheat flour / it thickens itself
/ pour continually until combined / until it becomes thick /
as a thin salve*-dough / take then from
an egg or two the yolks / stir it there-
under / and a bit [of] melted fat / let then the iron
heat up / pour with a spoon upon it / and press it closed / lift
it over fire / turn the dough / according to the sharpness [taste] you want/
meddle with it often / that the iron doesn?t become too hot / and otherwise
burn itself / the egg yolks otherwise make [it] easily from the iron
come off / With the honey / take a honey / do it into a
warm water / and thicken well up / as stated above / put also
a yolk or to there under / the go well on the iron / the
[ones] with sugar may [be] well done hurridly / then they will be
badly browned / one may at times honey and sugar take mixed together
take / they go quite easily from the iron

Katherine


Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2010 23:03:10 +0200
From: "Susanne Mayer" <susanne.mayer5 at chello.at>
To: <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Subject: [Sca-cooks] On Nattes

I do know for a fact that you still find wafer irons (round about palm sized 
sometimes with "pictures" espercialy if they were intended for comiunion 
wafers with overlong handles) at antique markets and high class flea markets 
(pricy items and you need a wood fired stove for them to work,...)

I will have to check if there sis a oblaten recipe in Nostradamus (he does 
use it but I haven't had it in hand for quite some time).

here is a german site with a bit of history and some pictures, maybe you 
will find some things of interest on these pages:

http://www.waffelbar.de/Waffelgeschichte.html

http://www.waffelbar.de/Waffeloblaten.html

the term nattes f. in french does also mean mat which would make sense here 
and with the love for all french (if it is not spanish it has to be 
french,... the aristocracy either followed the french or spanish / 
habsburgian court) this seem a good "translation"  Mats or Matten does not 
sound so "upity"

http://dictionary.reverso.net/french-english/collaborative/nattes/45333

French ? English
nattes   n.
1) braids (pl.f.), 2) mats (pl.f.)

Katharina


Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2010 15:29:54 -0700 (PDT)
From: wheezul at canby.com
To: "Cooks within the SCA" <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Kochbuch der Maria Stenglerin (Augsburg 1554)

Oh squee Johnnae!

Although it's not a facsimile, it is wonderful. First read through I
discovered both the word waffel and Waffel Eisen (page 27)which relates
back to an earlier post about oblaten.  So those words were clearly used
in Germany and it does looks like the transcription is faithful to the
common variant spellings from the 16th century.  The waffles made from a
dozen eggs, a half a mas of sweet milk, clarified butter, flour and yeast
(leavening).  They are allowed to rise and then are cooked on the waffle
iron.  Nom.  (Anyone remember the waffle wiffer?  That would be me...)

A recipe for rose honey looks intriguing.  And I like the apothocary
section at the end from pages 33 - 40 with various flavored waters and
sugars.

I thank the wonder reference woman once again :)

Katherine

<<< I've had a note from Thomas Gloning that he has a new
German cookbook available as a .pdf on his website.

It's a 19th century reprint of a cookbook (or cookery mss.) dated 1554.

Das Kochbuch der Maria Stenglerin (Augsburg 1554) (PDF).
http://www.uni-giessen.de/gloning/tx/stenglerin-kochbuch-1554.pdf

Johnnae >>>


Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:20:48 -0700 (PDT)
From: wheezul at canby.com
To: "Cooks within the SCA" <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] On Nattes

<<< I do know for a fact that you still find wafer irons (round about palm sized
sometimes with "pictures" especially if they were intended for communion
wafers with overlong handles) at antique markets and high class flea markets
(pricy items and you need a wood fired stove for themn to work,...) >>>

There is quite a nice collection of period wafer irons on bildindex 
(http://www.bildindex.de )

Katherine


Date: Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:25:21 -0400
From: Johnna Holloway <johnnae at mac.com>
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] More thoughts on Oblaten / Wafers

On Jun 27, 2010, at 12:01 AM, wheezul at canby.com wrote and mentioned a  
number of recipes and questions about wafers.

I had some time this weekend so I did some searching.
A 2004 German work that might be of interest is:
Panis angelorum - das Brot der Engel: Kulturgeschichte der Hostie
The Authors are Oliver Seifert, Ambrosius Backhaus

 Panis angelorum. Das Brot der Engel, Kulturgeschichte der Hostie,  
Begleitbuch zur gleichnamigen Ausstellung des Museums der Brotkultur,  
Thorbecke-Verlag Ostfildern, 2004  ISBN 13: 978-3-7995-0134-7  It can  
be purchased from a number of places. I think my copy came from the  
Bread Museum at Ulm which released the volume. http://www.museum-brotkultur.de/
 ?   Einzelpreis: 9,95 EUR   184 pages

Subjects:  Art, European;  Bread in art; Christian art and symbolism;  
Food; Lord's Supper
It contains this chapter titled Geschichte (und Technik) der  
Hostienb?ckerei which contains photos and illustrations of wafer irons  
for making the hostie or what will become the consecrated wafers. Also  
the other chapters contain a number of other artworks that feature  
wafers.

Johnnae

<the end>
Edited by Mark S. Harris	wafers-msg	Page 60 of 60