Mix ¼ pound of butter with 6 tablespoonfuls of sugar. Add the yolks of 5 eggs, ½ cup of milk, ½ pound of sifted flour with 2 teaspoonfuls of baking-powder, a pinch of salt and the grated peel of a lemon. Mix well; add the whites beaten stiff and bake in a well-greased waffle iron. Sprinkle with pulverized sugar and serve hot.
A rich, cake-like batter closer to a dessert waffle than a breakfast one. The only technical demand is folding: the beaten whites are the sole source of lift beyond the baking powder, so treat them gently.
- Weights into cups¼ pound butter is one stick, 113 g. ½ pound sifted flour is 227 g by weight, roughly 2 cups sifted — weigh it if you can, since sifted flour measured by volume varies widely.
- Pulverized sugarThis is confectioners' (icing) sugar, dusted over the finished waffles. The 6 tablespoons in the batter itself should be granulated.
- Order of workCream the butter and sugar first, then beat in the yolks, then the milk, then the flour sifted with baking powder and salt, following the recipe's own sequence. Whip the whites last so they do not deflate while you wait.
- Folding the whitesFold in thirds with a spatula and stop while a few streaks remain. Overmixing here gives a dense, leathery waffle — this is the hinge of the recipe.
- The ironThe recipe says only "waffle iron"; in a book of this date that most likely means a hinged cast-iron iron set over a burner and turned partway through. On an electric iron, use a medium-high setting; the high sugar and butter content browns fast, so start checking early.
- Greasing"Well-greased" is not decorative. Brush both plates with melted butter or oil before the first waffle and again if any sticking begins; a batter this sweet grips seasoned iron.
- Lemon peelGrate only the yellow zest of one lemon. Rub it into the sugar before creaming to draw out the oils.
- YieldYield depends on the size of the iron; the recipe gives none. Best eaten as they come off the iron; holding them in a warm oven softens the crust.
German-style waffles of this kind descend from a long Northern European tradition of thin batters baked between hinged irons, a form documented in the Low Countries and German-speaking lands from the late medieval period onward. What distinguishes this version from an American breakfast waffle is its proportions: a half pound of flour carried by a stick of butter, five yolks, whipped whites and lemon zest is closer to a sponge-cake batter than a breakfast one, and the finish the recipe specifies — a dusting of pulverized sugar, served hot — is a cake-like one rather than a syrup one. Long-handled irons for hearth or stovetop use were widely available in American kitchens by the end of the nineteenth century, which is presumably why a book of this sort could assume one without comment. The 365 dishes format — one numbered dish per calendar day, each tagged with a nationality — belongs to a wave of turn-of-the-century compilations that presented European home cooking to American housekeepers, with national labels applied loosely and without much regional precision.