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Plain Waffles
2 cups Five Roses flour 2 cups milk ½ cup melted butter 2 teaspoons sugar 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 2 eggs (beaten separately).
Have waffle iron hot and well-greased.
The book gives ingredients and a hot iron, and leaves the rest to a cook who already knew how to make waffles. The method is implied rather than written down.
- "Eggs beaten separately"This is the hinge of the recipe. Beat the yolks into the milk and butter, mix in the dry ingredients, then whip the whites to soft peaks and fold them in last. Skipping the fold gives a flat, dense waffle and loses the lift that carries the very high fat content.
- Mixing orderWhisk flour, sugar, baking powder and salt together first, then add the liquids. With equal volumes of flour and milk the batter will be thin rather than thick; a few lumps will hydrate while the iron heats.
- The half cup of butterFour ounces of fat to two cups of flour is rich by modern standards, and it is what makes these waffles crisp without a long bake. Let the melted butter cool slightly before it meets the beaten yolks.
- Baking powderIt is not certain which type of powder was intended; both single- and double-acting powders were on the market by the book's date. With modern double-acting powder the amount is fine, but the batter still keeps its best rise if you cook it within about fifteen minutes of folding in the whites.
- The ironThe original says nothing about the type of iron; for a period kitchen this would most likely have been a cast-iron waffle iron set over a burner and turned by hand. On an electric iron, preheat fully and use a medium-high setting; brush with oil or clarified butter for the first waffle even on a non-stick plate, since the butter in the batter can still catch.
- How much batter, how longRoughly a scant half cup per standard square iron, spread just short of the edges as it will expand. Cook until the steam coming from the seam thins out noticeably, about 4 to 5 minutes; opening the iron early tears the waffle.
- YieldAbout eight to ten standard waffles, or four to five servings. Hold finished waffles in a single layer on a rack in a 200F oven rather than stacking them, which steams the crust soft.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal, one of the largest Canadian flour millers of its day, and was distributed in very large numbers as advertising for its Five Roses brand. Its terseness is typical of the genre: these were written for households where the basic sequence of a batter was assumed knowledge, and the page only needed to supply the proportions. Waffles came to North America chiefly with Dutch settlers, and by the early twentieth century the hinged cast-iron waffle iron, set over a coal or gas range and flipped partway through cooking, was common kitchen equipment; the instruction to have it "hot and well-greased" was the difference between a waffle and a ruined pan.