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Waffles
Take one quart of flour, a tea-spoon of salt, a table-spoon of melted butter, and milk enough to make a thick batter. Mix thoroughly. Add two well-beaten eggs, and one measure each of acid and soda (or two heaping tea-spoons acid and one moderately heaping tea-spoon soda) of Horsford's Bread Preparation; stir well, and bake at once in waffle-irons.
A plain leavened waffle batter from the era when chemical leavening came in two separate packets. The only real puzzle is the Horsford's, and the milk quantity, which the book leaves to your judgment.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume: a quart is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb of modern all-purpose. That makes a large batch, about 10 to 12 waffles in a standard iron.
- Horsford's Bread PreparationA two-part leavening sold in separate cans of acid (monocalcium phosphate) and soda. Combined in a single tin, they became one of the earliest phosphate baking powders. Two heaping teaspoons acid plus one of soda for 4 cups of flour is roughly equivalent to about 4 teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder, though the substitution is only approximate.
- "Milk enough to make a thick batter"Expect roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups for 4 cups of flour. Aim for something that pours thickly from the ladle and spreads slowly, not a pancake batter that runs.
- Bake at onceThe hinge of the recipe. Phosphate leavening begins reacting the moment it meets liquid and does not hold well in the bowl; batter left standing will give flatter, tougher waffles.
- Waffle-ironsThese were hinged cast iron set over a stove opening and turned by hand halfway through. On a modern electric iron, preheat fully and cook 3 to 5 minutes per waffle, until steam stops escaping from the seam.
- Fat and greasingOne tablespoon of butter for a quart of flour is lean by current standards, and period directions commonly call for greasing the irons before each waffle. Even a nonstick iron benefits from a light brushing before the first one.
- EggsWhole eggs beaten in, not separated. If you want the lighter waffle the period also admired, beat the whites separately and fold them in last, after the leavening.
Horsford's Bread Preparation is the reason this recipe reads oddly today. Eben Horsford, a chemist at Harvard, developed a calcium acid phosphate leavening in the mid-nineteenth century and marketed it through the Rumford Chemical Works, first as two separate powders to be measured out by the cook and later combined into the single-can baking powder still sold under the Rumford name. Cookbooks of the 1870s sit exactly at the turn: many recipes still call for saleratus and sour milk, while others, like this one, assume the cook has bought the branded preparation and knows the ratio of acid to soda. Waffles in American kitchens are usually traced to Dutch settlement, and the long-handled hinged iron heated over coals or a stove eye was a standard piece of nineteenth-century equipment; the recipe gives no cooking time, presumably because doneness was judged by the iron rather than the clock.