Ice Box Cheese Wafers, Pg. 34

I must tip my hat to Mrs. W. H. Barnwell (Mary Royall) for being as vague as possible in handing over her family recipe for Ice Box Cheese Wafers to the Charleston Receipts book committee back in 1950. I'd be surprised if anyone since has managed to decipher her true intent behind "...bake in moderate oven."

What temperature? For how long? A recipe for Cheese Straws listed above the Ice Box Cheese Wafers on the same page advises 350 degrees for 25 minutes - that's roughly what I went with.

I made the dough last Thursday night, rolled them into a cling-wrap tube and chilled them in the ice box, which, my mother told me, meant the refrigerator, not the freezer. I pulled the dough out a few hours later and in slicing it into wafers, found it was too crumbly and kept falling apart. I had this vision of the super-thin crackers with one pecan on top of each and it wasn't working. I made about two dozen thick wafers with 3/4s of the dough. Ehh. Whatev.

On left, too thick. On right, too thin.

To my great surprise, I pulled out the little knob of dough from the fridge 24 hours later with the intent of chucking it and it was rock solid. I could slice the crackers as thin as I needed. In fact, I cut them too thin. After I baked them, several crumbled en route to the cooling rack.

Next time, I'm going to use sharper cheddar and more than a "heavy pinch" of cayenne, as Mrs. Barnwell suggested.

This first recipe was a process of trial and error - perhaps a little more error in this case.