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General Directions (Take one even teaspoonful)
Take one even teaspoonful The Great Arm & Hammer Brand Soda (or Saleratus), sift and mix thoroughly through one pound or quart of flour, and add sour milk enough to knead the dough.
Two teaspoonfuls Pure Cream Tartar to one of The Great Arm & Hammer Brand Soda (or Saleratus) ought to produce the same effect; but sour milk or buttermilk is preferable, because good Cream Tartar is difficult to obtain, besides being expensive.
Housekeepers using Baking Powder can make the very best for immediate use by mixing through a sieve thoroughly one part The Great Arm & Hammer Brand Soda (or Saleratus) with two parts Cream Tartar, WHICH MUST BE STRICTLY PURE. Should a supply be desired for future use, take larger quantities in the same proportion and add another part of powdered cornstarch or good flour. Have all perfectly dry before mixing together. The result will be the best Baking Powder possible to be obtained. Keep in an air-tight package. The only ingredient containing raising properties, however, is Soda (or Saleratus). Housekeepers will readily perceive that by using The Great Arm & Hammer Brand Soda (or Saleratus) with sour milk simply, they save many times the cost of Baking Powders. In using Soda (or Saleratus) in recipes containing molasses, remember always to put the dry Soda in a bowl and pour the molasses on to the Soda. It will dissolve quickly, foam up, and make your cake or pudding a beautiful golden yellow. Hot lard can also be poured on the Soda to dissolve it, but never boiling hot water in recipes for baking.
Nothing makes more delicious cakes and biscuits than buttermilk. Sour Cream is also very nice, but not always so easy to get.
The following recipes are recommended to housekeepers as being especially adapted to the use of Church & Co's Great Arm & Hammer Brand Soda (or Saleratus), and sure to secure good results, having been tested and proved by experienced cooks.
In these recipes it is always advisable to use The Great Arm & Hammer Brand Soda (or Saleratus) by sifting it throughout the flour or meal before wetting; but if housekeepers prefer to dissolve the Soda (or Saleratus) in water, it is important that the water be lukewarm.
We have in these recipes paid particular attention to the use of Soda (or Saleratus) without Cream Tartar. Pure Cream Tartar, is almost unattainable, as all intelligent housekeepers know. Should, however, it be desirable to substitute Cream Tartar fór sour milk or cream in any of these recipes, twice as much Cream Tartar should be used as Soda, in place of the sour milk or cream.
This is the pamphlet's leavening primer, and it doubles as a formula for homemade baking powder. The proportions still work; the assumptions about what is available in a grocery no longer do.
- The core ratioOne level teaspoon of soda per pound of flour, which is roughly 3 1/2 to 4 cups by modern measure, plus enough sour milk to bring it to a dough. That is close to the usual modern proportion of about 1/4 teaspoon of soda per cup of flour, and it depends on the milk being genuinely acidic.
- Saleratus and sodaThe pamphlet treats them as interchangeable, and by the later nineteenth century they largely were. Earlier saleratus was potassium bicarbonate, harsher in flavour; what is in the box today is sodium bicarbonate, exactly the soda intended here.
- "Sour milk" is not spoiled milkIt means clabbered raw milk or true churned buttermilk, both reliably acidic. Pasteurised milk left out does not sour the same way and should not be used. Cultured buttermilk from a carton is the closest working substitute; plain yoghurt thinned with milk, or milk soured with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar per cup, also works.
- The cream of tartar complaint is obsoleteAdulteration of cream of tartar was a genuine nineteenth-century problem, though a soda pamphlet also had a commercial interest in stressing it and steering the cook to sour milk. Cream of tartar sold now is pure potassium bitartrate and inexpensive, so the substitution advice — twice as much cream of tartar as soda — is straightforward to follow.
- The homemade baking powderOne part soda, two parts cream of tartar, one part cornstarch for keeping. By weight this gives a workable single-acting powder. Sift all three together several times and store airtight; it will lose strength over a few months, unlike commercial double-acting powder.
- Single-acting means no waitingCream of tartar reacts as soon as it is wet, so batters and doughs raised with this powder or with sour milk must go straight into the oven. Modern double-acting powders hold a second reaction in reserve for the oven's heat; this one does not.
- The molasses trickPouring molasses onto dry soda is sound practice, not folklore — molasses is acidic enough to react with it and the alkali darkens the crumb. Do it in a bowl with room to spare, as the foaming is vigorous.
- Never boiling waterThe warning is correct. Boiling water drives off the carbon dioxide before the batter can trap it. Lukewarm water, or better still sifting the soda dry through the flour, keeps the gas where it is wanted.
This is the opening page of an advertising pamphlet, and it reads like one: every mention of soda carries the brand name. Church & Co. was the firm of James A. Church, whose Arm & Hammer trademark is generally traced to his earlier Vulcan Spice Mills and which passed into the combined Church & Dwight business in the later nineteenth century. The commercial argument being pressed here is worth noticing — chemical baking powders were the new competition, and the pamphlet's line of attack is that a box of soda plus the sour milk already in the dairy does the same work for a fraction of the money, while packaged powders sell you cornstarch and cream of tartar you could mix yourself. The complaint that pure cream of tartar was "almost unattainable" was not merely sales talk: nineteenth-century cream of tartar was routinely cut with alum, terra alba and worse, and public anxiety about adulterated leaveners ran high in the decades before food-purity legislation.