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Home-Made Baking Powder
½ pound tartaric acid ½ pound best baking soda 1 quart Five Roses flour.
Procure the first two ingredients from a trustworthy druggist. Sift the three ingredients thoroughly together as many as half a dozen times, and put the powder in air-tight cans or bottles, excluding the light. Use an even instead of a heaping teaspoon ordinary baking powder. This recipe has been tried four years by -Mrs. John Jones, Surge Narrows, B.C.
A home-mixed single-acting baking powder from the days when a remote household could not count on a fresh tin from the store. It works, but it behaves differently from the double-acting powder on shelves now.
- It acts once, and immediatelyTartaric acid is the fastest of the baking acids and reacts with the soda the moment liquid is added. Batter mixed with this powder must go straight into the oven; a rested batter will be flat.
- The proportionsHalf a pound each of tartaric acid and soda to a quart of flour. A quart of sifted flour weighs roughly a pound, so the mix is about 1 part acid, 1 part soda and 2 parts flour by weight. The recipe's own instruction to use a level spoonful in place of a heaped one suggests the cook was expected to treat it as stronger, spoon for spoon, than the tinned powder she was used to.
- Why flour is in itThe flour is filler and buffer, keeping the acid and the alkali apart in the tin and letting the powder be measured by the spoon. Modern powders use cornstarch instead, which is drier and keeps better.
- "A trustworthy druggist"The druggist was the usual source for pure tartaric acid when this book was compiled, and the recipe's insistence on a trustworthy one reflects real variation in what was sold. Today buy food-grade or USP tartaric acid, not a laboratory or technical grade, which carries no purity guarantee for consumption.
- Sift, and sift againHalf a dozen siftings is not padding. Uneven distribution gives pockets of raw soda, which taste soapy and yellow the crumb.
- Storage and shelf lifeAir-tight and dark is right, but do not expect it to keep like a commercial tin. Mix small batches and test potency by dropping half a teaspoon into hot water; it should fizz hard at once.
- Substituting in modern recipesRecipes written for double-acting powder assume some lift in the oven. With this powder all the gas comes at mixing, so handle the batter quickly and do not let filled pans stand.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour, and it was built largely from recipes mailed in by Canadian housewives, each credited by name and post office. Mrs. John Jones of Surge Narrows, on Read Island in British Columbia's Discovery Islands, was writing from a coastal settlement served by steamer, where a tin of baking powder might be weeks away and a druggist's order of tartaric acid and soda went much further. Home-mixed powders were also a response to a long-running public argument over commercial leaveners: cream-of-tartar and tartaric-acid powders were widely promoted in that era as the pure alternative to alum-based ones, and a cook who mixed her own knew exactly what was in the tin. That the filler here is Five Roses flour rather than cornstarch is, of course, the publisher's hand on the page.