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Arm and Hammer Soda in Cooking
Use The Great Arm & Hammer Soda with sour milk instead of baking powder and sweet milk. Wipe all meats that come into your kitchen with a cloth wet with a solution of The Great Arm & Hammer Soda. Beside cleansing, the Soda instantly corrects any taint.
In boiling all meat, unless from a very young animal, put a quarter teaspoonful of The Great Arm & Hammer Soda into the water. Old poultry, ham, tongue and corned beef are rendered tender and digestible by this treatment. Before cooking sweet-breads, soak for an hour in cold water in which a teaspoonful of The Great Arm & Hammer Soda has been dissolved, to remove the blood from the vessels. If you have not soft water at hand for tea-making, add a pinch of The Great Arm & Hammer Soda to filtered water. All green vegetables except corn are greatly improved in flavor and brightened in color by adding a bit of The Great Arm & Hammer Soda to the boiling water. In the case of dried vegetables, add a half teaspoonful to each two quarts of water after the cooking has been going on for some time: the fiber will quickly soften and the period of boiling be considerably shortened.
Dried beans are a valuable food when their tendency to flatulence is overcome by the addition of a tablespoonful of The Great Arm & Hammer Soda to the cooking water just as the boiling is finished. Let them bubble up well, then drain. Add fresh water if the beans are wanted for soup or baking. The odor from boiling cabbage is lessened by the use of a little of The Great Arm & Hammer Soda in the cooking water. Egg-plant laid over night in water with a little of The Great Arm & Hammer Soda is rendered very white and tender. Onions have a more delicate flavor and will not prove dis agreeable after eating if about half a teaspoonful of The Great Arm & Hammer Soda is added to the water in which they are boiled.
A certain English restaurant is famous for its thick soup, which is as nourishing as it is delicious. This is the recipe: Boil two small young summer squashes in well salted water until tender. Boil one peck of peas, good-sized but not old, in an uncovered saucepan with a sprig of mint and a pinch of The Great Arm & Hammer Soda. Put all together through a sieve, add salt, white pepper and a dash of cayenne. Heat in a double boiler. Just before serving add enough cream-about half a cup-to give it the right consistency and richness. An economical cook seldom buys lard. Save all trimmings, skimmings and drippings, place in a saucepan and melt over a moderate fire. Strain into a clean pan and add to each pound of fat a half cup of boiling water and a pinch of The Great Arm & Hammer Soda to sweeten it. Boil slowly until the water is evaporated; strain into a tin pail and keep covered until used.
This is an advertising leaflet's list of kitchen uses for baking soda, with one genuine recipe — an English restaurant's pea and squash soup — and a method for rendering fat, embedded in it. Some of the advice is sound chemistry; some of it has been abandoned for good reason.
- Do not treat tainted meatWiping meat with soda solution masks odor without touching the bacteria or the toxins already produced. Meat that smells off should be discarded, not deodorized.
- Soda in green vegetablesAlkaline water does hold chlorophyll green, which is why the trick was popular, but it also destroys thiamine and vitamin C and breaks down pectin, leaving peas and beans slimy. Modern practice is a large volume of hard-boiling salted water and a short cooking time.
- Sour milk and soda proportionsTo use the substitution in the first line, reckon about 1/2 teaspoon soda per cup of buttermilk or soured milk, replacing roughly 2 teaspoons of baking powder. Too much soda gives a soapy, faintly metallic taste and a yellowish crumb.
- A peck of peasA peck is 8 dry quarts. In the pod that is roughly 8 lb, yielding perhaps 2 to 2 1/2 lb shelled peas — the leaflet does not say which, so read it as peas in the pod and expect about 6 cups shelled.
- The soup, in practiceCook the peas uncovered with mint for 8 to 10 minutes only, pass everything through a sieve or blend and strain, then hold it in a double boiler. Adding the half cup of cream at the last minute is the point of the method: reheating a cream-enriched purée dulls the color. Serves about six.
- Dried beansThe tablespoon of soda at the end of boiling is a large dose and will taste of it if not drained and rinsed as directed. Soaking and discarding the soak water, then a full boil in fresh water, accomplishes the same thing without the alkali.
- SweetbreadsAn hour in cold water does draw out blood; salted or lightly acidulated water is the standard now, and sweetbreads still need blanching, trimming of membrane and pressing before final cooking.
- Rendered fat"A moderate fire" here means low and slow, well below smoking; while the added water is still in the pan the fat cannot go much above boiling anyway. The water-and-soda wash neutralizes free fatty acids, but a covered tin pail in the pantry is not adequate storage; refrigerate rendered fat and use it within a few months.
Church & Dwight, founded in the 1840s, sold sodium bicarbonate under the Arm & Hammer name from the 1860s onward; the arm swinging a hammer is generally traced to Vulcan, the Roman god of the forge, and to James A. Church's earlier Vulcan Spice Mills. Booklets like this one were distributed as advertising for the product, and their purpose was to widen the uses of a cheap single-ingredient product beyond leavening — hence the sweep from biscuit-making to deodorizing cabbage to clarifying kitchen grease. The heavy reliance on soda for vegetables and tough old meat reflects a period when packaged soda and baking powder had only recently displaced pearlash and older saleratus practice, when households still bought elderly fowl and rendered their own lard, and when the alkaline effect on color and fiber was prized well before anyone measured what it cost in vitamins or texture.