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Southern Waffles
1 egg. 1 teaspoon sugar 1 pint sweet milk 2 tablespoons (level) cornmeal 2 tablespoons melted butter 2 teaspoons baking powder ½ teaspoon salt Five Roses flour to make thin batter.
Mix butter and sugar thoroughly, add egg and beat well. Then sift the cornmeal, flour, salt, baking powder into the sugar and butter, adding milk as required, using up the flour before the milk. Bake in hot waffle irons and serve at once with butter and syrup. 4 eggs
The ingredient list is scrambled in the original — the four eggs appear at the end, after the instructions — and the flour is given only as "enough to make thin batter." Both are easily sorted out, but read the whole thing through before you start.
- The flour quantityWith a pint of milk and four eggs, a thin pourable batter takes roughly 2 cups of all-purpose flour, added gradually as directed. Aim for something closer to heavy cream than to pancake batter; it should flow to the edges of the iron on its own.
- "Sweet milk"Simply fresh unsoured milk, specified because buttermilk and clabbered milk were the everyday alternatives. Whole milk gives the closest result.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat flour, stronger than most modern all-purpose. Ordinary all-purpose works; the cornmeal is doing the important textural work here regardless.
- CornmealTwo level tablespoons is a small amount, added for the faint grit and crispness that mark these as "Southern." Use fine or medium yellow cornmeal, not coarse polenta, which will not soften in the short bake.
- LeaveningTwo teaspoons of baking powder for about 2 cups of flour is on the low side for a modern waffle batter, and the four well-beaten eggs presumably supply some of the lift. Beating the eggs well, as instructed, matters more than it looks; separating them and folding in the whipped whites at the end gives a lighter waffle if you prefer.
- The ironThis assumes a cast-iron waffle iron heated over a burner and turned once. In an electric iron, set it to medium-high and stop when steam stops escaping — roughly 3 to 4 minutes. Grease a cast-iron iron between waffles; a nonstick electric one needs it only for the first.
- Serve at onceTaken literally. Waffles held on a plate steam themselves limp within a minute or two. If you must hold them, keep them in a single layer on a rack in a 200F oven.
- YieldAbout six to eight waffles in a standard round iron, enough for four people.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by Lake of the Woods Milling Company as advertising for its flour, and it collected recipes sent in by customers across Canada — which is why a page in a Canadian flour book carries a recipe labelled "Southern." The southern claim rests on the cornmeal: in the American South, cornmeal in a wheat batter is often said to have added crispness and flavour to waffles and griddle cakes, a habit carried over from cornbread baking. Waffle irons themselves long predate the electric appliance; the hinged, long-handled cast-iron pattern implied here was heated on the stovetop and turned by hand, and remained standard in home kitchens well into the 1920s.