This recipe is a bit later, but is perfectly feasible for 15th century as well. Thanks to my collegue Phillip Troy (in the SCA known as Master Adamantius) for his work on this. I've used it myself, scaled down and found it very tasty, though we had to play with the flour:liquid ratio a bit (it was very humid).

you can see a photo of us making wafers in camp at: http://www.liripipe.com/maisnie/Playing.htm

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, andmix 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.

Our reconstruction:
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 pint heavy cream
6 large egg yolks, beaten
1/4 - 1/2 cup rosewater
1 cup sugar
1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon
pinch salt

Sift the flour, cinnamon, and the salt together, set aside. Beat the eggyolks and sugar together until light and bright yellow. Add the cream and 1/4 cup rosewater, mix thoroughly. Fold the dry ingredients into the liquid. If the batter is too thick, you can thin itwith more rosewater until it is clearly a soft batter but too thick to easily pour.

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 anappropriate amount of batter into the irons. You'll need to experiment to get the exact amount and placement right. My old-fashioned 5-inchpizzelle iron uses a heaping teaspoon of batter (roughly a leveldessertspoon for those that use such measures). Bake till golden, and beaware that the wafers will continue to brown a bit after they come outof the irons. Cool on a cake rack until crispy or roll into tubes orcones while hot and flexible. Makes about three dozen, depending on thesize of the iron, and the obvious necessity to hide several that areunevenly browned by immediately eating them. You have your reputation toconsider, after all. Historically, most of the wafers eaten in period Europe appear not tohave been very sweet, but IÕve used a fair amount of sugar both toappease 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 LeMenagier de Paris, should probably be made with a much softer flour than all purpose, probably some kind of pastry flour would be the way to get themdecently crisp without a lot of sugar. All purpose flour tends to be slightly glutinous in this wafer when unsweetened, especially when using dilute orsecondary shortening sources like egg yolks and cream. Of course, we cannot really be sure how crispy wafers were supposed to get in period, either.If you manage to bring leftovers home from events, they make excellentice cream sandwiches...

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hope this works for you! we ended up eating them all and didnt have any for the meal. Oh well!

--AM

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quote:

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Originally posted by Jamie & Christine:
AM,
Thanks loads for the recipe! I figure I'll need to play around with this a bit. That's the fun of this stuff, though.
Great pictures!
Thanks,
Jamie

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any time, Jamie . let us know how it goes!

--AM, who thinks she may need to bring her waffre iron to Bates?

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