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Sour Milk Waffles
Two quarts sour milk or butter milk, which is better, half cup melted butter, two teaspoons soda dissolved in hot water; you may need more soda, this depends upon the condition of the milk; add flour enough to make a batter not very stiff, two well beaten eggs, a little salt, mix in the morning, if wanted for supper. A little more butter may be required if the sour milk is not rich.
A stove-top waffle-iron batter from the era when soured milk was a daily by-product rather than something bought. The proportions are enormous by current standards and the leavening is deliberately left to the cook's judgement.
- ScaleTwo quarts of milk with flour to match makes something like 30 to 36 waffles. Quartering the recipe — 2 cups buttermilk, 2 tablespoons melted butter, half a teaspoon of soda, one egg — gives a manageable eight or nine.
- Sour milkFresh milk left out today does not clabber the way raw milk did; pasteurised milk simply spoils. Use cultured buttermilk, which the recipe itself prefers, or milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice per cup.
- How much sodaThe vagueness is real and the original is honest about it. Cultured buttermilk needs roughly half a teaspoon of soda per cup of liquid, so two quarts wants closer to 4 teaspoons than 2. Taste a spot of raw batter: soapy or metallic means too much, and a flat sour edge means too little.
- Flour enough"A batter not very stiff" is pourable but not thin — it should fall from the ladle in a ribbon that sinks slowly. For two quarts of milk expect somewhere between 7 and 9 cups of flour.
- Mix in the morningThe long rest lets the batter slacken and sour further through the day, which adds tang and tenderness. If you want lift at supper, hold the soda back and beat it in with the eggs just before baking, since gas raised in the morning will largely be spent by evening. Rest the batter in the refrigerator, not on the counter.
- ButterThe recipe does not say why more butter is wanted when the sour milk is not rich; fat in the batter both enriches it and helps keep waffles from tearing on cast iron. Grease the plates for the first waffle regardless.
- The ironA stove-top iron wants to be hot enough that a drop of water skitters, and it needs turning halfway through. In an electric iron, treat this as a standard buttermilk batter: steam stops escaping when the waffle is done, usually 4 to 5 minutes.
Sour milk recipes belong to a household economy where milk came in whole and turned on its own timetable, and nothing was thrown out. Clabbered milk and buttermilk left over from churning were both mildly acidic, which made them the natural partner for saleratus and later baking soda — the reaction between the two was the cheapest leavening available through the nineteenth century, well before commercial baking powder became universal. The instruction to "mix in the morning, if wanted for supper" is a small piece of evidence about how these kitchens ran: batters, doughs and sponges were started early and left to work while the cook did other things, so that the evening meal needed only a hot iron.