Home › Griddle Cakes and Waffles › Quick Waffles
Quick Waffles
(6 Eggs) 2 pints sweet milk 1 cup melted butter 6 eggs (beaten separately) 8 teaspoons (level) baking powder Five Roses flour.
Mix the milk and butter together, and add enough sifted Five Roses flour to make a soft batter. Add the well-beaten yolks, then the beaten whites. Lastly, before baking, add 8 teaspoons baking powder. These are very good with 4 or 5 eggs, but much better as above.
A big, rich, egg-leavened batter from the era when waffle irons sat on the stove top and a family breakfast meant two dozen waffles. The quantities are generous enough that most cooks will want to halve them.
- Scale firstTwo pints of milk, six eggs and a cup of butter will yield roughly 20 to 24 waffles in a modern iron. Halving everything, including the baking powder, gives a manageable batch for four to six people.
- UnitsIf the pint is the US measure, 2 pints is 4 cups of milk; a Canadian book of this date may intend the imperial pint of 20 fl oz, which would make it 5 cups, so judge the batter by feel rather than by the number. "Sweet milk" simply means fresh whole milk as opposed to soured or buttermilk.
- How much flourThe recipe leaves flour open on purpose. For 4 cups of milk expect about 4 to 4 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour, stopping when the batter falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon rather than a lump.
- Baking powderEight level teaspoons across four-plus cups of flour is about 2 teaspoons per cup, on the high side by current practice; 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup is plenty with double-acting powder. Adding it last, as directed, still matters, and the batter should go straight onto the iron rather than resting.
- "Bake"In this book baking a waffle means closing it in the iron, not putting it in an oven. Heat an electric iron to its medium-high setting or a cast-iron stove-top iron until a drop of water skitters, roughly 375 to 400F, and turn a stove-top iron once during cooking.
- The whitesFold the beaten whites in with a light hand and stop while streaks are still visible. Beating them into submission at this stage costs the lift the six eggs are there to provide.
- GreasingWith a full cup of butter in the batter the iron needs only a light film of fat at the start, and non-stick irons need none at all.
- Holding themWaffles hold well in a single layer on a rack in a 200F oven. Stacking them traps steam and softens the crust within minutes.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal, a flour miller that gathered recipes from Canadian housewives and printed them to sell its brand, so nearly every entry names Five Roses flour where a plain cookbook would say simply flour. Waffles are usually said to have reached North America with Dutch and German settlers, and were cooked in long-handled hinged irons held over the fire or set into a stove opening; the instruction to "bake" them reflects general period usage for setting a batter by heat. The lavish use of eggs beaten separately, and the aside that four or five will do but six is better, place this squarely in the period after chemical baking powder became cheap and reliable but before it entirely displaced beaten whites as a source of lift, and the result is a waffle noticeably lighter and richer than a modern quick batter.