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Waffles
1 3/4 cups flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 cup milk Yolks 2 eggs Whites 2 eggs 1 tablespoon melted butter Mix and sift dry ingredients; add milk gradually, yolks of eggs well beaten, butter, and whites of eggs beaten stiff; cook on a greased hot waffle-iron. Serve with maple syrup.
A waffle-iron should fit closely on range, be well heated on one side, turned, heated on other side, and thoroughly greased before iron is filled. In filling, put a tablespoonful of mixture in each compartment near centre of iron, cover, and mixture will spread to just fill iron. If sufficiently heated, it should be turned almost as soon as filled and covered. In using a new iron, special care must be taken in greasing, or waffles will stick.
A plain baking-powder waffle batter, written for a hinged cast-iron waffle iron set directly on a wood or coal range. The batter itself needs no changes; the cooking instructions assume a vessel most kitchens no longer own.
- Electric ironIf you are using an electric waffle iron, ignore the heating-and-turning directions entirely and preheat as the manufacturer specifies. Grease it once before the first waffle even if it is nonstick; this batter has only a tablespoon of fat in it and sticks readily.
- Stovetop cast ironA traditional stovetop iron does need heating on both sides before it goes near the batter; heat it until a drop of water skitters. The turning during cooking is what cooks the top surface, since there is no heat source above.
- Do not overmixFold the beaten whites in with a light hand and stop while streaks are still visible. Overworked batter gives a tough, bready waffle rather than a crisp one.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to 1 3/4 cups flour is a generous but normal amount for the period. Modern double-acting baking powder behaves differently from early single-acting brands, and 2 1/2 teaspoons is ample if your waffles taste faintly bitter or metallic.
- FatOne tablespoon of melted butter is lean by current standards, which is why the greasing warning is so emphatic. Increasing it to three or four tablespoons gives a crisper waffle that releases more easily, though the result is richer than the original.
- Rest the batterTen minutes of standing before the whites go in lets the flour hydrate and the waffles brown more evenly. Once the whites are folded in, cook without delay or they will deflate.
- YieldAbout four to six waffles depending on iron size, enough for two to three people. Serve them as they come off the iron; stacking traps steam and softens the crust.
This is a standard American baking-powder waffle of the turn of the twentieth century, and the fussy paragraph about heating and greasing the iron is the real point of the entry. Waffle irons of the period were long-handled hinged castings that sat in a hole in the range top or rested on it, and the cook had to manage both faces by hand; a new iron had to be seasoned through use before it would release anything. Chemical leavening was by then widely used for waffles alongside the older yeast-raised versions, which had to be set the night before, so a batter like this one could be mixed and cooked in one morning.