Waffles
One pint cream, one pint milk, two eggs, a little salt; stir the batter as stiff as sponge cake, beat the whites of the eggs separately and stir in last. دہ
A very short waffle formula of the kind written for cooks who already knew what waffle batter should look like. Two things are missing outright: the flour and any leavening, so treat the text as a ratio rather than a full recipe.
- The flour is not given"Stir the batter as stiff as sponge cake" is the only guide. With a quart of liquid you are heading toward roughly 4 cups of flour; add it gradually until the batter falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon rather than a stream. This is a genuine gap in the original, not something a conversion can fix.
- No leavening is listedThe lift here comes entirely from the two beaten whites, which makes for a tender, custardy waffle rather than a crisp one. Other waffle recipes of the period do use baking powder or a yeast sponge; if you want the familiar crisp shell, a modern waffle recipe is the better starting point.
- Whites last, and foldedWhites last -- the original says only to beat them separately and 'stir in last'. Work them in with a light hand just before baking; stir them in fully and you lose the only leavening the recipe has.
- Cream and milkOne pint cream plus one pint milk is a rich batter by any standard. Ordinary heavy cream works; the fat is what keeps these waffles soft rather than brittle.
- A pintA US pint is 2 cups, so this is a quart of liquid in total — a large batch. Cut it in half unless you are feeding eight or more.
- The ironNo equipment is specified; recipes of this sort were generally made in a hinged cast-iron waffle iron. In an electric iron, use a medium-high setting and expect about 4 minutes per waffle; the batter's high fat content means it browns faster than a lean one.
- YieldRoughly 12 to 16 waffles from the full quart, depending on the iron. They soften quickly, so hold them in a single layer on a rack in a 200F oven rather than stacking them.
Waffles reached American kitchens through both Dutch and English channels — the Dutch wafel is the usual etymological ancestor. The long-handled hinged iron, thrust into the coals and flipped halfway through, did the work. The brevity here is typical: the ratio of liquid to eggs was the part worth writing down, while the flour was added by eye to a consistency the cook already knew, in this case borrowed from sponge cake as a reference point every reader would recognise.