Waffles
3 Eggs, (good sized) 1 qt. Flour, 1 tablespoonful Water, A pinch of Salt, 1 cup sour Cream, 2 heaping tablespoonfuls Lard or Butter (melted) 1/2 teaspoonful The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda.
Beat the eggs well, and add the salt; pour into the eggs the sour cream and melted lard or butter.
Sift the flour into a pan or bowl and pour the milk, etc. into it and stir well. It should be a soft batter; if too stiff, add a little more cream or milk. Just before you start baking the waffles, dissolve the Soda (or Saleratus) in the water and beat into a batter. Have the waffle iron quite hot. A tablespoonful of sugar may be added to the batter also, if you want them sweeter.
A soured-cream waffle batter from a soda company's promotional pamphlet, written when "sour cream" meant cream that had gone acid on its own. Two things need attention: the flour-to-liquid ratio, and what sour cream is now.
- The proportions do not balanceA quart of flour is roughly 4 cups, near 1 lb, against a single cup of cream and 3 eggs. That will not come together as a soft batter without a great deal more liquid, and the recipe half admits it ("if too stiff, add a little more cream or milk"). Expect to add another 1 1/2 to 2 cups of buttermilk or milk, or start with 2 cups of flour and work up.
- Sour cream then and nowIn this period the term meant raw cream left to clabber: acidic, pourable, closer to today's buttermilk or creme fraiche thinned with milk. Modern cultured sour cream is thick and stabilised; loosen it with buttermilk to a heavy-cream consistency before using, or substitute buttermilk outright.
- Saleratus is baking sodaThe pamphlet's own product. Half a teaspoon of soda needs the acid in the sour cream to do anything, which is why the recipe uses no baking powder. If you switch to sweet milk, the soda has nothing to react with and the waffles will taste soapy.
- Dissolve the soda, then bake at onceThis is the hinge. The soda goes in dissolved in the tablespoon of water at the last moment, and the batter should hit the iron immediately. Let it stand and the carbon dioxide escapes into the air instead of into the waffle.
- "Quite hot" ironWritten for a hinged cast-iron waffle iron set over a range and turned halfway through baking. On an electric iron use a medium-high setting; on stovetop cast iron, preheat both faces and grease them each time, as this batter has no sugar to help release.
- Milk appears without being listedThe method says "pour the milk, etc. into it" though only cream is in the ingredients. Read it as the wet mixture generally; milk is the thinner the recipe expects you to reach for.
- YieldWith the flour reduced to a workable batter, roughly 8 to 10 standard waffles, depending on the iron. Unsweetened as written, which suits butter and syrup or a savoury topping; the optional tablespoon of sugar is barely noticeable across this much flour.
This comes from one of the small recipe booklets Church & Dwight distributed with its bicarbonate of soda, in which the formulas call for "The Great Arm & Hammer Soda." Such pamphlets were a chief means of teaching American cooks to use chemical leaveners, and they had a specific problem to solve: soda alone does nothing without acid, so the recipes lean hard on sour milk, sour cream and molasses, all of which were routinely on hand in a household that kept its own cow. The word saleratus, used here as a synonym for soda, is older and looser: it covered both potassium and sodium bicarbonate as sold in the mid-nineteenth century, and it lingered in cookbook language for decades after the refined sodium product had taken over the market. Waffles themselves long predate the leavening; the hinged iron was a fixture of American hearths well before soda arrived, when the rise came from yeast or from beaten eggs alone.