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Waffles
To serve five or six people, take four eggs, and to the beaten yolks add a little salt, a pint of milk and enough flour to make a stiff batter. After mixing these to a smooth consistency, thin the mixture by adding gradually the beaten whites of the eggs and enough milk to make it quite thin enough to pour from a teacup, adding half a teaspoon of yeast powder. Have the waffle pan thoroughly hot and well greased with lard, and pour the batter in from a cup.
A plain egg-and-milk batter of the sort written for a cook who already knew what waffle batter should look like. The quantities are given by feel, so read the consistency cues rather than hunting for measurements.
- Yeast powder is baking powderDespite the chapter heading, no yeast is involved. "Yeast powder" was a common nineteenth-century name for chemical baking powder, and the half teaspoon called for is the entire leavening. Modern practice would use closer to 2 teaspoons for this much batter; with half a teaspoon the eggs are doing nearly all the lifting.
- The flour is unmeasured"Enough flour to make a stiff batter" with four yolks and a pint of milk works out to roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups, but the original genuinely leaves it to judgment. Build the stiff batter first, beat it smooth, then let it down again — that order is what keeps it lump-free.
- The pouring testThe recipe asks only that the batter be thin enough to pour freely from a teacup, perhaps around the thickness of heavy cream. That is thinner than many modern waffle batters, which suits the shallow irons of the period; in a deep Belgian iron it may spread thin and crisp rather than rise.
- Fold the whites, do not stir themAdding the whites -- The whites go in as the thinning agent and carry some air with them, so treat them gently: cut them through in two or three additions along with the extra milk rather than beating the batter hard at this stage. The original does not say to fold, but hard beating would lose whatever lift the whites contribute.
- The waffle panThis means a hinged cast-iron iron set over the range or coals and turned partway through cooking. An electric waffle iron needs no turning; brush it with lard or a neutral oil the first time and expect about 4 minutes per waffle.
- Greasing with lardLard gives good release on bare iron and stands up to the heat. Butter is more likely to brown and stick at waffle-iron heat; oil, shortening, or lard all behave as intended.
- YieldThe stated five or six servings means roughly ten to twelve waffles from the shallow irons of the period — fewer, and larger, from a modern deep-grid iron. Serve straight off the iron; these do not hold well.
Waffles came to American kitchens through Dutch and English practice and were long a griddle-side food rather than a breakfast fixture, cooked in long-handled hinged irons thrust into the fire and turned by hand. The confusion in this book's filing is itself period detail: the recipe sits under bread made with yeast, yet the leavening is "yeast powder," one of several loose names for chemical leaveners — along with baking powder and, earlier, saleratus, a generic term for bicarbonate, used with sour milk — that circulated as such leaveners displaced barm and brewer's yeast in the second half of the nineteenth century. Older waffle recipes really were yeast-raised and set to rise overnight. The reliance on four beaten egg whites for lift, with only half a teaspoon of powder, marks a cook working in the transition between the two systems.