#15 Benne Wafers 1954

"Benne wafers?" Annette asked, eyes wide as she peered into my container.

"Yes. How did you know the name of these cookies?" I asked. I'd brought about a dozen to a weekend basketry retreat.

"I'm from the south. We ate them all the time, mostly for special holidays."

 "Maybe I should find a better recipe if they are that popular. They caused me no end of trouble."

Flattened with a knife on left, only dented on right.
Cookies spread out the same, regardless of knife technique.

I told Annette, a fellow basket weaver and retreat attendee, about my project. These cookies were published in my birth year.

I suppose some people, when confronted with a year by year compendium of cookies, would skip directly to their own birth year and imagine that cookie the best of the bunch. Others would contemplate how representative it is of the era. I did no such thing. In fact, the recipe of 1954 crept up on me. Like each passing year seems to do.

Spread-out cookies.

I remember making lace cookies in my teens, and today's recipe is very similar. It contains only 1 1/2 tablespoons of butter, 2 tablespoons flour, and the balance sugar, spices and sesame seeds. These cookies are intended to spread out from a small teaspoon of dough to a light, crisp, 3-4-inch circle.

I began in good humor. Really, I did.

At first, I wasn't sure if I was supposed to take my "knife dipped in ice water" and flatten each mound of dough into a circle, or just beat down the center to give it a head start on spreading. I tried both.

Uncooperative cookies.

In the end, it didn't matter. All spread liberally into their neighbors. No personal boundaries for these cookies.

I guess the "buttery cooky sheet" I was to drop these onto was supposed to be slathered, not merely spread with my usual thin layer. My first attempt to slide them off the sheet wrinkled them into a mass that quickly brittled and fell apart. I scraped the rest into a bowl. I had topping for ice cream, but no cookies.

Cow-spot shaped cookies.

My second batch I placed on parchment paper under the theory that parchment at least releases from the cookie sheet. Given the ooze of the last batch, I did not bother to spread butter on the parchment. That was another mistake. The cookies spread irregularly and just so far on the dry paper. They formed flat blobs, like the spots on a Guernsey cow. They were thicker than the freely spreading cookies, but at least they were intact.

For the third batch, I added butter to the parchment before applying the dough. Still irregularly shaped, but the edges trailed off to nothing. The butter allowed them to flow when heated, whereas the earlier batch had "hit a wall."

The top cookie has a rounded edge due to resistance of
the parchment with out butter; the bottom cookie, baked
on buttered parchment, trails off to nothing at the edges.

Now, that second batch - the ones that had a hard time spreading out - remind me of the water tension effects we studied in high school Physics class. Have you noticed that if you pour slowly, you can pour water until it is above the edge of a glass? The water doesn't flow over the edge due to the cohesive forces of the water molecules. The very edge of the water is called a meniscus, and looks just like the edge of a cookie baked on parchment without butter. OK, not exactly analogous to the cookies, but a worthy scientific diversion.

For the final batch, I used all of the above tricks, plus I spread the dough into perfect circles. Once again, the little devils spread irregularly into each other. I threw up my hands.

Really, after perpetrating this recipe on its readers, it's a wonder this magazine didn't go out of business in 1954. How could this be the cookie representative of my birth year?

I offered Annette one of the few cookies that held together. We each bit off a crisp end, which crumbled gently in the mouth. The delicate toasted vanilla flavor melted away to chewy sesame seeds. How could these ugly, scornful, mischievous morsels make me wish for even more punishment?

Find this recipe yourself, if you dare. Then, let me know if you find a version that works.