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Raised Waffles
One quart flour, one pint sweet, luke-warm milk, two eggs, a able-spoon melted butter, tea-spoon salt, half tea-cup good yeast.- Mrs. L. S. Williston, Heidelburg, Germany.
A yeast batter mixed the night before, from the era when waffle irons were long-handled and held over coals. The measurements are volume-by-container, and the yeast is the one line that needs real translation.
- The measuresA quart of flour is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb (450 g); a pint of milk is 2 cups. The batter should pour thickly, like heavy cream — hold back a little milk and adjust after the flour is in.
- "Good yeast"Half a teacup is somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 cup of liquid barm or homemade yeast, depending on how the book reckoned a tea-cup; either way it is a live starter of unpredictable strength. A modern equivalent is roughly 1 teaspoon instant or active dry yeast, no more, since the batter is meant to rise slowly rather than race.
- Timing the riseThe recipe gives no timing, and in fact no method of any kind; the overnight schedule is an inference from how comparable yeast batters were handled. Six to eight hours covered at cool room temperature should give the tangy, open, lacy crumb that distinguishes raised waffles from baking-powder ones; two hours in a warm spot gives lift without the flavour.
- Sweet, lukewarm milk"Sweet" means fresh rather than soured — nothing to do with sugar, and there is no sugar in this batter. Lukewarm means about blood heat, 95-100F; milk much hotter than that will kill the yeast.
- When to add the eggsThe recipe does not say. Eggs beaten in just before baking give the lightest result, the whites whipped separately and folded if you want them very light; adding them at the start of a long overnight ferment slackens the batter.
- The ironAn electric waffle iron on a medium-high setting works; the batter is thin and spreads readily, so use less than you would for a stiff modern batter. Grease the plates the first time even if they are nonstick, as there is only one tablespoon of butter in the whole quart.
- YieldAbout eight to ten waffles in a standard iron, serving four.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (Marysville, Ohio, 1877) was assembled from contributions by named women, and this one carries an address in Heidelberg — a reminder that the book's network of households reached well beyond Ohio. Yeast-raised waffles are the older form: before chemical leavens were cheap and reliable, an overnight sponge was how a cook got air into a batter. The word waffle comes through Dutch wafel, and the long-handled hinged iron is often said to have come to America with Dutch and German settlers; recipes like this one held on to yeast well into the baking-powder age, and the fermentation adds a faint sourness that no chemical leaven reproduces.