Gerda Holmes
1¾ cups flour
WAFFLES
3 teaspoons Royal baking powder ½ teaspoon salt 1 cup milk 2 eggs: yolks 2 eggs: whites 1 tablespoon melted butter Mix and sift dry ingredients; add milk gradually, yolks of eggs well beaten, butter, and whites of eggs beaten stiff; cook on a greased hot waffle iron. Serve with maple syrup.
Sincerely yours,
A standard early twentieth-century separated-egg waffle batter, closer to a thick pancake batter than to modern yeasted or buttermilk versions. It works as written, with two things worth sorting out first.
- The salt figure"1½ teaspoon salt" against 1¾ cups flour is out of proportion, and the singular "teaspoon" suggests a typesetting slip for ½ teaspoon. Use ½ to ¾ teaspoon; a full 1½ teaspoons will taste distinctly salty.
- Royal baking powderA cream-of-tartar (tartrate) powder in 1916, single-acting: it began releasing gas the moment liquid hit it. Any modern double-acting powder substitutes one for one, but the old formula is the reason the batter was meant to go straight onto the iron rather than rest.
- Beaten whites are the leavening that mattersBeaten whites -- the recipe carries 3 teaspoons of baking powder as well, so the whites are not the only leavening, but they are what gives the batter its lightness and helps the crisp shell. Beat to soft-firm peaks and fold in last with a spatula in a few strokes; deflate them and you get a flatter, tougher waffle.
- Batter consistencyOne cup of milk to 1¾ cups flour gives a fairly thick batter before the whites go in. The recipe does not say what flour; modern all-purpose may absorb more than the softer flours then common, so a tablespoon or two more milk may be needed to get a batter that spreads on the iron.
- "A greased hot waffle iron"This assumed a cast-iron stovetop iron heated over a burner and turned by hand. On an electric iron set medium-high, brush the plates with melted butter or oil for the first waffle even if they are nonstick, since there is little sugar in this batter to help release.
- Cooking timeThe original gives none. Reckon 3 to 5 minutes per waffle, and go by the steam: when the heavy plume from the seam thins to almost nothing, the waffle is done and dry enough to be crisp.
- YieldAbout four 7-inch round waffles, or roughly two servings at breakfast. Double it comfortably if you are feeding a table.
This comes from Celebrated Actor Folks' Cookeries, a 1916 collection in which stage and screen performers contributed favourite recipes, each signed off as though it were a fan letter — hence the stranded "Sincerely yours" at the foot of the page. Gerda Holmes was a silent-film actress of the mid-1910s, and what she sent in is not a family secret but a plain waffle formula of a kind widely circulated at the time, down to the brand name; Royal was a heavy advertiser, and its appearance by name in recipes of this era is as much marketing as instruction. The separated-egg method it uses relies on whipped whites and a well-heated iron for crispness rather than on acid and soda.