Waffles
3½ cups flour. 2 tablespoons baking powder. 1 teaspoon salt. 2 cups milk.
Yolks 4 eggs.
Whites 4 eggs. 1 tablespoon melted Cottolene.
PROCESS: Mix and sift dry ingredients, add milk gradually, beating constantly. Add Cottolene, yolks of eggs well-beaten and whites of eggs beaten stiff. Beat mixture thoroughly. Cook in well-greased, hot waffle iron (use melted Cottolene for greasing waffle iron), browning first on one side, then turn iron and brown on the other. Serve with maple or lemon syrup.
A stovetop-iron waffle batter from a Cottolene promotional cookbook. Two things need attention before you start: the shortening, which no longer exists, and the flour-to-milk ratio, which is stiffer than any modern waffle batter.
- CottoleneA branded cottonseed-oil shortening, beef-suet blended, sold by N. K. Fairbank and heavily promoted through cookbooks like this one. Melted butter or a neutral oil stands in for the tablespoon in the batter and for greasing the iron.
- The batter is very thickThree and a half cups of flour to two cups of milk plus four eggs gives something closer to a drop batter than a pourable one. For a modern deep-welled iron expect to add a half cup to a cup more milk to get a batter that spreads on its own.
- Folding the whitesThe instruction to "beat mixture thoroughly" after adding the stiff whites undoes the point of beating them. Beat the batter thoroughly before the whites go in, then fold them through in two additions and stop while a few streaks remain.
- Turning the ironThe recipe assumes a hinged cast-iron waffle iron set over a burner and flipped halfway through. An electric iron cooks both faces at once; ignore the turning and go by the steam, which slows noticeably when the waffle is done, roughly 4 to 5 minutes.
- Baking powderTwo tablespoons is six teaspoons for three and a half cups of flour, roughly one and three-quarter teaspoons per cup, a little above the usual modern ratio of one to one and a half teaspoons per cup. Older powders varied in strength.
- Lemon syrupCommonly made at home in this period from sugar and water boiled to a light syrup, taken off the heat and flavoured with lemon juice and zest, though bottled versions were also sold. Maple syrup needs no explanation.
- YieldAbout ten to twelve waffles from a standard modern iron, enough for six people.
52 Sunday Dinners was published by the makers of Cottolene, and the shortening's recurrence throughout the recipes is the reason the book exists. Cottolene arrived as cottonseed oil went from a waste product of the cotton gin to a cheap kitchen fat, and it was marketed hard to American home cooks as a clean, economical replacement for lard, complete with free cookbooks and recipe pamphlets. Waffles themselves are much older on this continent, generally said to have been brought by Dutch settlers and long cooked in long-handled hinged irons held over the coals or set on a range top; the electric waffle iron did not become a common household object until the 1920s. What dates this particular recipe is not the waffle but the tablespoon of branded fat and the instruction to grease the iron with it.