Home › Cookery › Corn Meal Waffles
Corn Meal Waffles
One pint of corn meal scalded. While hot add to it, two tablespoonfuls of lard or butter, three well beaten eggs, a cup of boiled rice, a pint of flour, a teaspoonful of salt.
Thin to the proper consistency with milk.--Mrs. Dr. S.
A batter of scalded meal, boiled rice and eggs, from the era of the hinged cast-iron waffle iron set over coals. It carries no chemical leavening at all, so a few decisions have to be made before you start.
- Scalding the mealPour boiling water over the pint of cornmeal — roughly a cup to a cup and a half of water — and stir to a thick mush. This gelatinizes the starch and helps keep the waffles tender rather than gritty. Add the fat and eggs while the mush is still hot but not scalding, or the eggs may set in threads.
- No leavening as writtenThe lift comes only from the beaten eggs and the steam of the iron, giving a dense, crisp, almost pancake-like waffle. If you want the open texture of a modern waffle, about two teaspoons of baking powder stirred into the flour is consistent with what other recipes in this period do; the original simply assumes a very hot iron and a heavy hand with the eggs.
- The boiled ricePlain white rice, cooked soft — a cup of cooked rice, not raw. Break it up or mash it into the hot meal so it disappears into the batter. Leftover rice from a previous meal would have answered.
- Consistency"Thin to the proper consistency with milk" means a batter that pours thickly but still flows off the spoon in a ribbon, closer to heavy cream than to cake batter. Expect to need 1 1/2 to 2 cups of milk, added gradually; the meal keeps absorbing liquid, so check again just before baking.
- Lard or butterTwo tablespoons of either works; lard was common in this period and gives a slightly crisper edge. Melt it before adding so it disperses in the hot mush.
- Baking themA modern iron should be fully preheated and greased even if it is nonstick; a cornmeal batter tends to stick more than a plain wheat-flour one. Give them 4 to 6 minutes, longer than you would a plain waffle, and do not lift the lid early; the cornmeal needs time to set.
- YieldAbout eight to ten waffles in a standard round iron, serving four. The batter does not keep well overnight once thinned with milk, as the meal continues to swell.
Cornmeal and rice together are a signature of the Southern breakfast table, where wheat flour was stretched with whatever the household already had cooked. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathers such recipes by contributor — here "Mrs. Dr. S.", one of the many named and half-named Virginia housekeepers whose initials fill the book — and its bread chapter alone runs through dozens of cornmeal batters for waffles, batter cakes, muffins and pones. Using cooked rice as a softener in bread batters is often associated with the Carolina lowcountry, where rice was a staple crop, and it does real work: the gelatinized rice starch holds moisture and keeps a cornmeal batter from baking dry. Waffles of this kind were baked in a long-handled iron held in the fire or set on a stove eye, turned once so both plates cooked.