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Quick Waffles
Two pints sweet milk, one cup butter (melted), sifted flour to make a soft batter; add the well-beaten yolks of six eggs, then the beaten whites, and lastly (just before baking) four tea-spoons bakingpowder, beating very hard and fast for a few minutes. These are very good with four or five eggs, but much better with more. -Mrs. C. W. Morey.
A rich, egg-heavy waffle batter from an era when waffles were baked in hinged cast iron over coals. The proportions work in a modern iron, but the flour is left entirely to your judgment.
- Quantities in modern termsTwo pints sweet (fresh, unsoured) milk is 4 cups; one cup melted butter is 8 oz, two sticks. Expect to need roughly 4 to 4 1/2 cups sifted flour to reach a soft batter — thick enough to mound briefly on the spoon, thin enough to spread in the iron.
- This makes a great dealFour cups of milk and six eggs will yield something like 20 to 24 standard waffles. Halve everything unless you are feeding a crowd; the batter does not keep well once the baking powder is in.
- The hinge: powder last, bake at onceThe instruction to add baking powder "just before baking" is the whole method. Single-acting powders of the period spent their lift within minutes, so the batter went into the iron immediately. Modern double-acting powder is more forgiving but still loses volume if the batter stands.
- Beating the whitesWhip to soft peaks, not stiff and dry, and fold them in rather than stirring. The later instruction to beat "very hard and fast" applies to distributing the powder — do it quickly and stop.
- Butter and the ironWith a full cup of butter in the batter, a well-seasoned or nonstick iron needs little or no extra greasing. Cast iron waffle irons should be preheated thoroughly and given a light brushing of fat for the first waffle only.
- DonenessRoughly 4 to 5 minutes in a hot iron; the steam escaping from the seam slows noticeably when the waffle is set. Lifting the lid early tears an egg-rich waffle in half.
- On the egg countMrs. Morey's note is accurate — more yolks give a custardy, tender crumb and more whites give lift. Six is the version to make; four produces a plainer, sturdier waffle.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (first published in Ohio in the 1870s and reprinted through the 1880s) came out of a moment when chemical leavening was reshaping American home baking. "Quick" in this title means exactly that: raised with baking powder rather than with yeast and a night's rising. Commercial baking powders had come onto the market in the mid-1850s and 1860s, though wide domestic use belongs to the late 1860s and 1870s, and books of this period are full of recipes recast to use them, often with the anxious instruction to add the powder at the very last moment \single-acformul hen sold. The credit line is typical of the book's method: Buckeye Cookery was assembled from contributions by named women of the community, and Mrs. C. W. Morey's aside about using more eggs is the kind of practical note the compilers printed as given.