French Waffles
3 cups Gold Medal flour 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 cup butter 1 cup sugar 7 eggs 1 tablespoon brandy Grated peel of 1/2 lemon 1 yeast cake 2 cups milk Cream the butter, add the sugar, add singly the yolks of eggs and grated lemon peel. Add flour and milk alternately, beating until it is full of bubbles. Add the dissolved yeast cake and the stiff whites of eggs. Let it rise three hours and bake as ordinary waffles.
A rich yeast-raised waffle batter of the sort that was standard before baking powder took over the breakfast table. Nothing here is difficult, but the leavening and the sugar both need handling with modern equipment in mind.
- Yeast cakeA yeast cake of this period was normally a block of compressed fresh yeast; the modern equivalent is usually taken as about 0.6 oz of fresh yeast, or roughly 2 1/4 teaspoons (one packet) of active dry yeast. Dissolve it in a few tablespoons of the milk warmed to about 105F rather than adding it dry to a cold batter.
- Order of operationsThe hinge is that the beaten whites go in after the yeast and just before the three-hour rise. Fold them in rather than beating, or you lose the air that keeps this batter from baking dense.
- The riseThree hours at a warm room temperature (70-75F) will give a visibly domed, bubbling batter. Cover the bowl. If your kitchen is cold, expect longer; if it is over 80F, check at two hours before it collapses.
- EggsEggs of this period tended to run smaller than today's large. Six large eggs is a fair substitution for the seven called for, and the batter is forgiving either way.
- Sugar and scorchingA cup of sugar in three cups of flour is a great deal by modern waffle standards, and it browns fast. Run an electric iron a setting or two below your usual and pull the waffles when they are deep gold, not dark.
- Greasing the ironWith a cup of butter in the batter, a seasoned or non-stick iron needs little or no added fat. Grease a bare cast-iron waffle iron lightly the first time only.
- Brandy and lemonBoth are flavourings, not leavening or structure. The brandy can be left out with no effect on the batter; the grated peel of half a lemon is roughly 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons of zest.
- YieldThe original gives none. Expect about 12 to 16 waffles from a standard round iron, enough for six to eight people.
The Gold Medal Flour cook book was a promotional volume from the Washburn-Crosby milling company of Minneapolis, the firm that later became General Mills, and it collected respectable middle-class recipes that would sell sacks of flour. "French waffles" in American books of this period often seems to mean a rich, yeast-risen batter with butter, sugar and separated eggs, distinguished from the plain buttermilk-and-soda waffles of everyday cooking; the name is sometimes taken to gesture at the gaufre of Northern France and Belgium rather than at any particular French source, though that is inference rather than documented derivation. Yeast, not baking powder, was the older way to raise a waffle, and a batter set to rise for three hours belongs to a household where breakfast was planned the way bread was planned. Chemical leavening had been available for decades by the time this book appeared, so the survival of a yeast-raised waffle here is a mark of a recipe kept for its flavour and lightness rather than its convenience.