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Baking Powders
Baking powders are now so well and frequently prepared by good makers, and can be bought readily in large or small packets, that it is almost needless to give instructions for making them. For the benefit of those, however, who prefer home-made preparations, the following recipe is given, and will be found both excellent and economic:--Crush half a pound of tartaric acid to a fine powder, and mix with it three-quarters of a pound of carbonate of soda and three-quarters of a pound of ground rice. Put the mixture into a tin box, and store it in a dry place. When wanted, use a heaped tea-spoonful of the powder with each pound of material. Probable cost, 10d. per pound.
A home-blended single-acting baking powder from the era when commercial brands were still new enough to need justifying. It works, but the proportions are worth examining before you scale a batch.
- The acid is not cream of tartarTartaric acid is about two and a half times as strong, weight for weight, as cream of tartar (potassium bitartrate), and it reacts almost instantly with water. Do not substitute one for the other by volume.
- The soda is in excessNeutralising half a pound of tartaric acid takes about nine ounces of bicarbonate of soda; the recipe calls for twelve. The surplus leaves an alkaline, faintly soapy taste and can yellow a pale crumb. A batch made to a 1:1.1 acid-to-soda ratio by weight behaves better.
- Carbonate of sodaIn Victorian cookery writing this usually means sodium bicarbonate, ordinary baking soda, and is best read that way here. Sodium carbonate (washing soda) is a different and far more strongly alkaline salt, and is not what this recipe wants.
- Ground riceFinely milled rice flour, used as a filler and moisture absorber. Cornstarch is the modern equivalent and does the same job.
- It is single-actingThere is no slow-acting phosphate or aluminium salt here, so all the gas is released the moment liquid is added. Get the batter into the oven at once; a mix left standing on the bench will bake flat.
- DosageThe original specifies a heaped teaspoon per pound of material, not flour specifically. A pound of flour is roughly 3 to 4 cups, which makes this light by modern standards, where 1 to 1.5 tsp per cup is usual. Treat the original figure as a starting point rather than a rule.
- Quantity and storageTwo pounds of finished powder is a great deal for a domestic kitchen. Mix a tenth of the recipe, keep it airtight and dry, and test it by dropping a pinch into hot water; if it does not fizz vigorously, discard it.
Cassell's opens by conceding that the recipe is nearly redundant, which is itself the historical point: within a generation, chemical leavening had gone from a novelty to a shop-bought staple. Egg-free baking powders are generally traced to Alfred Bird in Birmingham in the 1840s, with Eben Horsford's phosphate-based powders following in the United States, and by the closing decades of the century branded tins were on every grocer's shelf. Home blending survived among cooks who distrusted adulteration, a real concern in a period when commercial powders were sometimes bulked out with alum or worse. The instruction to store the tin in a dry place is the whole difficulty with the domestic version, since acid and soda sitting together in a damp larder will quietly exhaust themselves long before the box is empty.