Waffles
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 2 cups milk, scalded and cooled 1 tablespoonful sugar 1 tablespoonful lard or butter, melted 2 1/2 cups sifted flour 1 teaspoonful salt 2 eggs WAFFLES make a most tempting breakfast dish. Served crisp and piping hot, with plenty of fresh butter and thick golden honey or maple syrup, they're food for an epicure.
Dissolve yeast and sugar in lukewarm milk. Add lard or butter, flour, salt, and eggs well beaten. Beat thoroughly until batter is smooth. Cover and set aside to rise in a warm place, free from draught, for about one hour. When light, stir well. Have both sides of waffle iron hot and well greased. Fill the cooler side. Brown on one side, turn the iron and brown on the other side. If batter is too thick, the waffles will be tough. If wanted for over night, use one-fourth cake of yeast and an extra half teaspoonful salt. Cover and keep in a cool place.
A yeast batter rather than a baking powder one, risen an hour or left overnight. One line in the method gives away exactly what equipment the booklet had in mind.
- There is nothing to turn on an electric ironHave both sides hot, fill the cooler side, brown one face and turn the iron: that is a hinged cast iron waffle iron sitting on a burner and flipped halfway through. An electric iron heats both plates at once and the turning step vanishes. Close it and leave it until the steam slows.
- Thin batter, crisp waffleThe booklet’s warning is the useful one in the recipe. The batter thickens as it stands, and it will. Loosen it with a little milk until it pours in a ribbon; thick batter steams itself tough inside a closed iron.
- Overnight, with a quarter of the yeastThe variation tacked on at the end makes the better waffle. A quarter cake is about half a teaspoon of active dry yeast, and the extra half teaspoon of salt is there to hold the fermentation back through the night. Keep it covered and cool, and stir the risen batter down before baking.
- The eggs go in before the riseMany modern overnight waffle recipes hold the eggs back until morning. This one beats them in at the start, which means they ferment along with everything else. Either approach works; this one carries more of the sour note into the finished waffle.
- YieldNo count is given. Two cups of milk and two and a half cups of flour make eight or so waffles in a standard round iron. A deep Belgian iron will take fewer, and this thin batter is not really built for one.
Raising waffles with yeast is the older practice, and by the time this booklet was printed it was already the minority one, because baking powder made a waffle that could be decided on and eaten within the hour. What yeast offers in exchange is precisely what the overnight variation is selling: a batter mixed before bed, left somewhere cool, and poured straight into the iron at breakfast, with a tang and a lacy, brittle shell that chemical leavening does not produce. The instruction to turn the iron dates the kitchen exactly. A waffle iron then was two hinged plates on long handles, set over the coals or a burner and flipped so both faces cooked, and that single verb is a fossil of it. The booklet’s own verdict, food for an epicure, is immodest even by its standards, but the method behind it never quite died out, and the overnight yeast waffle is still the one cooks return to when they want the waffle to be the point rather than a vehicle for syrup.