Elizabeth's Sugar Wafers

Only three ingredients, but lots and lots of prep time!

This recipe comes to you courtesy of my wife browsing YouTube and stumbling upon Townsend's video about sugar wafers. Instantly intrigued, she suggested I swap this recipe in for one I was having a hard time tracking down an ingredient for. Always up for a challenge - especially when it involves an actual historical recipe - I happily adjusted the schedule to include these pillowy, simple but elegant cookies to the line up. 

These are a really versatile cookie - or biscuit, as they would have been called in 1774! - which you can really play around with flavor wise, but they're not exactly easy to make, despite their simple ingredient list. Read on to find out why this would have been a biscuit you'd want to save for a special occasion!

Jas. Townsend & Son Inc. is a company that specializes in providing people with well made, affordable period clothing and accessories for reenactment and living history work. I've drooled over many a thing on their website, wishing I had more of an opportunity to participate in living history to justify splurging on one their beautiful costume pieces. They've been on my radar for a long time, so you can imagine I was pretty excited when I discovered they have an active YouTube channel focusing on food history, and spotlighting other aspects of life during the 18th and early 19th century. 

The Townsend's YouTube channel has a huge amount of content, and it's a lot of fun watching John Townsend himself try out these historic dishes, putting these recipes and cookbooks in their historical context, and then sampling the food himself. He's a very honest reviewer and isn't going to tell you something tastes great if it was really a little off putting or strange to a modern palete. I'd definitely recommend checking them out if you're not already watching them. I have to admit, watching him work makes me wish I had a better set up to swap over to a YouTuber over a blogger! Maybe someday when I have a kitchen with better lighting and counter space. 

This recipe comes from a video published four years ago, and the original recipe comes from The Complete Housewife by Eliza Smith. First published in 1734, these biscuits contain only three extremely basic ingredients: four eggs, a cup of sugar, and six ounces of flour. You start off by whisking the eggs, then the eggs and sugar, and then finally whisking in the flour gradually until you've got a dough. Why does this recipe get deceptively difficult, you may be wondering? 

You have to whisk it continuously for an hour. An hour, or they won't come out the right texture at all. Friendly reminder that in 1734, that meant whisking by hand, and thus this recipe definitely wasn't something the casual baker would be trying out just for the heck of it. It also means there's a good chance it was a dish that paid servants or enslaved people would be making rather than the woman of the house, as a middle, working or lower class woman who couldn't afford servants or slaves would have had a lot of other household tasks she needed to tackle that were way more important than whisking cookie dough for an hour. 

Modern historical cookie enthusiasts have another option of course: using a stand mixer and letting the machine do the hard work for you. Townsend recommends taking that route if you're not interested in doing the historical way, and as I've only recently had my carpal tunnel issues treated, I wasn't interested in blowing out my wrist on one cookie recipe. 

I combined my eggs and sugar as instructed...

But wifey requested adding some freshly grated nutmeg as I added in the flour to give it a slightly more flavorful twist on the original. The batter was really gluey by the time we were ready to let the stand mixer go for an hour.

After an hour, the batter looked a little like a meringue to me. Obviously this isn't actually a meringue because it has flour in it, but the texture of the batter definitely reminded me of that or macarons. Very thick and airy! 

Downside, the stand mixer was very hot to the touch. Not about to burst into flame hot, but definitely a little alarming. It's enough to spook me off wanting to do this recipe often because I love my mixer and would be really upset to burn it out not even a year after I got it. Maybe in the future, wifey and I will trade off mixing duties with our hands and the help of a hand mixer.

Baking the cookies required an unusual step: dusting the cookie sheets liberally with white flour. Townsend advises that this technique keeps the cookies from going brown on the bottom, and cautions that as soon as the cookies start to go brown, they'll taste very eggy. I hate eggy desserts, so this was a warning I definitely heeded. 

I scooped out about a tablespoon of batter onto the sheets and gave them plenty of room to expand. The batter was hard to work with and stuck to the spoons I was using to get them out, so I'd recommend patience and/or a melon baller. 

They go into a 400 degree oven. Townsends says leave them to bake for about five or six minutes, but ours took about ten to be fully baked because our oven is very inconsistent and often requires several minutes longer to get stuff done.

The final step before they're ready to serve is brushing off the flour on the bottom of the cookies. You'll need to let them cool on the cookie sheets for a while before they've firmed up enough to handle for this step, so just set them aside for a few more minutes. If you're impatient, they'll crumble on you, and you'll have worked your arm or stand mixer to death for nothing. 

Jessi was kind enough to sacrifice one of her clean(!) tooth brushes to my culinary experiments, and it did a great job of knocking the flour off. You can probably just use your fingers, but it was taking forever and didn't seem very efficient, so if you've got a spare toothbrush lying around, would definitely recommend giving that a shot.

And voila! Here are what Townsend's calls "The Lightest and Crispiest Cookie You'll Eat!"

There's no question that these cookies would have been a treat for a special occasion in Elizabeth's time, considering how much labor went into making them. A cookie like that had better be worth the hard work, and I'd say these definitely were. They were very unusual, with a light, pillowy texture that was really pleasant to eat. They weren't really crispy, though. My cookies came out a lot bigger than the ones J. Townsend made in the video, so they might have been a much different texture than his. 

Flavor wise, they were sweet and a little nutmeggy, but otherwise just, I don't know... nice, basic cookies. They had a light, eggy flavor, but nothing too extreme or noticeable, and the nutmeg absolutely helped mask that. The recipe itself is a nice base you can add your own flavor twists to, as just about any spice or citrus would be a welcome addition to the really simple recipe. They're also absolutely a great companion to a cup of tea... or coffee for any patriots who might be interested in trying it out themselves. 

A final note: John Townsend points out that in the colonial period, these cookies would be baked twice to ensure they'd last for a long, long time, much like you'd do with a biscotti. The original recipe is a fair bit bigger than the one they adapted for their YouTube channel because it took a lot of effort to get colonial ovens hot enough to bake, so you'd want to make a ton of cookies all at once you could then enjoy for a long time afterward. I wouldn't recommend making an industrial size batch of these cookies, but if you want to try baking them twice, you'd get a crispier cookie. 

Overall, this was a really interesting historical recipe that I enjoyed making and eating, but I'm not sure I'd want to make it again too soon. Like I said above, the "easy modern way" made me nervous about the long term health of my favorite kitchen appliance, so I think I'd like to shelve this one for now. Wifey really loved them though, so I suppose we'll just need to troubleshoot and find a good way to whisk it all up without killing ourselves or the mixer.

Talk about a first world problem! I'm sure Elizabeth would think that was a crazy complaint!