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Waffles (Pint milk tablespoonfuls flour)
1 pint milk. 3 tablespoonfuls flour. 1 tablespoonful corn meal. 1 tablespoonful melted butter. 1 light teaspoonful salt. Three eggs, beaten separately, the whites added last. To have good waffles, the batter must be made thin. Add another egg and a teacup of boiled rice to the above ingredients, if you wish to make rice waffles.--Mrs. S. T.
A very lean batter by modern standards — closer to a custard than a pourable pancake mix. Read the flour quantity with suspicion before you commit a pint of milk to it.
- The flour is almost certainly understatedThree tablespoons of flour and one of cornmeal to a pint of milk gives a batter with roughly the body of thin cream; it will not set into a waffle in a modern iron. If you want to follow the spirit of it, expect to need something in the range of 1 1/2 to 2 cups of flour, but be clear that this is a reconstruction, not what the page says.
- "Thin" meant something differentThe instruction to keep the batter thin was written for a heavy cast-iron waffle iron heated at the hearth or on a range top, which would take a slacker batter than we would use today. An electric iron with a shallow grid will simply weep thin batter out of the sides.
- CornmealUse fine or medium yellow cornmeal, not coarse grits and not self-rising mix. Its job here is crispness and a faint grit on the tooth, not structure.
- No leavening at allThere is no soda, no baking powder and no yeast. All the lift comes from the three separately beaten whites, so fold them in with a light hand and cook immediately — a batter like this deflates within a few minutes of standing.
- Rice wafflesA teacup is not a fixed measure; it is usually reckoned at somewhere between half a cup and a cup. The rice should be plainly boiled, cooled and quite soft, and it wants breaking up with a fork so it disperses rather than sitting in lumps.
- Butter and the ironA tablespoon of melted butter in a pint of batter is not enough to keep these from sticking. Grease the iron between every waffle unless it is well seasoned or nonstick.
- YieldA pint of milk, correctly thickened, gives roughly six to eight waffles from a standard iron — enough for three or four people. Serve them as they come off the iron rather than stacking them.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named and initialled Virginia housekeepers, carries an unusually long run of waffle recipes, which tells you how central the waffle iron was to a Southern breakfast or tea table. The long-handled hinged iron, held over the hearth and turned to cook both faces, predates the stove by centuries in English and Dutch kitchens, and the pattern of contributions in this book suggests each household had its own settled formula. The rice variation is characteristically Southern: Carolina and Virginia cooks worked leftover boiled rice into breads, croquettes and batters as a matter of routine, and it lends waffles a moist, slightly chewy interior that flour alone will not give. Attributions like "Mrs. S. T." were one of the book's conventions, crediting the source while keeping her out of print by name.