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Raised Waffles
Stir into one quart of luke warm milk enough flour to make a stiff batter; stir in gradually to prevent its being lumpy, one tablespoon melted butter, one-half tea cup of yeast, one-half teaspoon soda, one teaspoon salt. Fill the waffle irons with batter, when light.
A yeast-raised waffle of the plain nineteenth-century kind: no eggs, no sugar, and a long rise that does the work flavour and lift would otherwise need. The recipe assumes a cook who knows what a risen batter looks like, so most of what needs adding is quantity and timing.
- The hinge: "when light"Everything depends on letting the batter ferment until it is domed, bubbled and smells faintly sour, not on the clock. With modern yeast that is roughly 1 to 2 hours in a warm room, or overnight in the refrigerator; with the slow barm the recipe assumes, considerably longer.
- Flour is unmeasured on purposeFlour is unmeasured — A quart of milk will take a good deal of flour, likely five cups or more, to reach a stiff batter, and the exact amount depends on the flour. Aim for something thicker than pancake batter at the outset; fermentation will loosen it noticeably, and it may need thinning with milk before it will pour.
- Half a teacup of yeastThis is homemade liquid yeast or barm. A nineteenth-century teacup was not a standard measure, so half of one is somewhere in the region of two to four fluid ounces of active, foaming starter. It is not interchangeable with a packet by volume; a teaspoon or so of active dry or instant yeast is the usual modern stand-in for this quantity of milk, though the flavour will be milder.
- The sodaThe half teaspoon of soda is not leavening in the ordinary sense; it neutralises the acidity that a long yeast rise produces. Nineteenth-century cooks often stirred it in at the last minute, just before baking, rather than at mixing as written here.
- Lukewarm means lukewarmBlood heat, around 100F. Milk hot enough to feel warm on the wrist is right; anything approaching hot will kill the yeast outright.
- The ironsThese were hinged cast-iron waffle irons set over coals or a stove plate and turned by hand. In an electric iron, preheat fully, grease it even if it claims to be nonstick, and expect about 3 to 5 minutes a waffle. Fill only two-thirds full: a risen batter expands hard in a closed iron.
- What is missingNo eggs and no sugar. The waffles come out crisp, lean and tangy rather than cakey, and with no sugar they brown more slowly than a modern sweetened batter.
- YieldA quart of milk makes a large quantity, roughly 12 to 16 waffles depending on the iron. Batter can be held in the refrigerator for a day or so, though with the soda already stirred in it is better baked without much delay.
Raised waffles are the older form of the dish; chemical leavening only displaced yeast in American waffle batters over the course of the nineteenth century, and books of this period frequently carry both kinds side by side. The soda here marks the transition neatly, appearing not as the raising agent but as a corrective to the sourness of a long ferment, a trick that spread with the wide availability of saleratus and then bicarbonate. The half teacup of yeast is the clearest sign of the domestic economy behind the book: the cook was expected to keep a jar of liquid yeast or barm alive on a shelf, drawing on it and feeding it back, since commercial compressed yeast was not yet universal in the home kitchen.