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Pastry Powder, or Baking Powder
Take an equal bulk, not weight, of tartaric acid, carbonate of soda, and ground rice. Mix thoroughly. Roll the mixture with the rolling-pin to free it from lumps, and keep it in a closely-stoppered wide-mouthed bottle until wanted. When making common pastry, put a tea-spoonful of the powder with every pound of flour, and in making cakes allow a heaped tea-spoonful to every pound of material. This powder will make the pastry lighter, and render it also more digestible. Time, a few minutes to prepare. Probable cost, 1s. per pound.
This is a working formula for single-acting baking powder, and it behaves quite differently from the tin on the supermarket shelf. Two of the three ingredients need attention before you mix anything.
- "Carbonate of soda" means bicarbonateVictorian recipe books used the name loosely, but what you want here is sodium bicarbonate — ordinary baking soda. True sodium carbonate (washing soda) is far more alkaline, leaves a soapy taste, and is not a food ingredient.
- Tartaric acid is not cream of tartarTartaric acid is the free acid and is roughly twice as strong as cream of tartar (potassium bitartrate), and much faster. Measured by bulk against soda as here, the gas is spent almost at once.
- Ground rice is the fillerIts job is to keep the acid and the alkali physically apart and to absorb ambient moisture. Cornflour (cornstarch) does the same work and is what commercial powders use.
- Equal bulk, not weightThe instruction is emphatic — the three powders have different densities. Measure by volume with the same spoon or cup for each.
- It is single-acting and fastA tartaric-acid powder starts fizzing the moment it meets liquid and is largely finished before the dish reaches the oven. Mix, then get the pastry or cake into the heat immediately; batter left standing on the bench will be flat.
- The dosage is light by modern standardsA teaspoon to the pound of flour is about a quarter of what a modern chemical-raised cake would use — closer to one teaspoon per four cups. Expect a modest lift, which is what "lighter pastry" meant here, not a sponge.
- Storage genuinely mattersThe wide-mouthed stoppered bottle is not fussiness. Homemade powder without a commercial anti-caking agent absorbs water from the air and dies quietly. Make small batches and test a pinch in warm water before trusting it: no vigorous fizz, no lift.
- Cost"1s. per pound" is one shilling.
Chemical raising agents were still a novelty within living memory when Cassell's was compiled: cooks of the previous generation had relied on yeast, on beaten eggs, or on saleratus and sour milk. The acid-plus-alkali powders that replaced them are generally traced to the middle decades of the century, with Alfred Bird in Birmingham credited with an early commercial version around 1843 and Eben Norton Horsford's calcium-phosphate powder following in the 1850s. The quoted price per pound suggests a recipe meant to be made up at home from cheap chemists' staples. The claim that the powder renders pastry "more digestible" belongs to the period's confident dietetics: lightness and digestibility were treated as much the same virtue.