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Home-Made Baking Powder (No. 2)
8½ ounces cream of tartar 4 ounces of soda 2 ounces cornstarch.
Best quality of each should be purchased. Sift all together at least a dozen times, the last time into baking powder tins. Seal up all cracks by pasting strips of paper over them. About one half as much of this is required as of the average powder sold. The cornstarch is added to take up the moisture and keep the powder dry. -Miss Ruth Aykroyd, Kingston, Ont.
A single-acting cream-of-tartar baking powder, mixed by weight. It works exactly as it did in 1913, provided you understand that it behaves differently from the tin on the supermarket shelf.
- The hinge: it acts once, in the bowlCream of tartar and soda react as soon as they meet liquid, not again in the oven's heat. Modern double-acting powders hold back a second rise; this one does not, so batter must be mixed quickly and go straight into a hot oven.
- "Soda" means baking sodaSodium bicarbonate, sold then as bicarbonate of soda or saleratus. It is not washing soda, which is caustic and inedible.
- Weights, and their rough volumes8 oz cream of tartar is about 1½ cups, 4 oz soda about ½ cup, 2 oz cornstarch about ½ cup. Powder densities vary enough that a kitchen scale is the honest way to do this.
- The 2:1:1 ratio is the whole recipeThe proportions are the whole recipe -- 4:2:1 by weight: two parts cream of tartar to one of soda, which is close to the neutralising ratio, with cornstarch at half the weight of the soda. The cornstarch is inert filler and moisture buffer. Halving it makes a stronger powder, not a better one -- the starch is what keeps it from caking and self-reacting on the shelf.
- "Half as much as the average powder sold"The contributor's own claim, not a measured one; commercial powders of the day were often accused of being heavily diluted. Against a modern double-acting powder this mix is likely in the same range for leavening strength, so it is safer to substitute one for one and adjust from there than to halve blind.
- Test it before you bake with itStir a teaspoon into a few tablespoons of hot water. A vigorous, immediate foam means it is live; a lazy trickle means moisture has already got in.
- StorageSkip the pasted paper strips and use a small glass jar with a gasket or a tightly screwed lid, kept away from the stove and sink. Even well sealed, mix only what you will use within two or three months.
- YieldAbout 14 ounces, or roughly 2½ cups — enough for a great deal of baking. Halve or quarter the batch unless you bake daily.
Home-mixed baking powder appears in the Five Roses Cook Book — the recipe collection issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and built largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, this one from a Miss Ruth Aykroyd of Kingston — at a moment when commercial powders were widely distrusted. Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the trade was split between cream-of-tartar powders and cheaper ones raised with alum or phosphate, and the rival manufacturers ran long, loud campaigns accusing each other of selling something injurious; a cook who mixed her own from three named ingredients knew precisely what was in it. Cream of tartar itself is potassium bitartrate, scraped from the crust that settles inside wine casks, which is why the price of a Canadian cake once moved with the European vintage. The instruction to sift a dozen times is not fussiness: an evenly dispersed powder is the only kind that raises a cake evenly, and before mechanical blending there was little else a cook could rely on to achieve it.