Home › Breads, Biscuits, Etc. › Martha Washington Waffles
Martha Washington Waffles
Beat 6 eggs very light, stir into 1 quart of flour, add 3 cupfuls of milk, 1 teaspoonful of salt and 3 tablespoonfuls or 1/4 of a cake-of yeast.
Beat well, let raise over night, stirring down before baking.
An overnight yeast-raised waffle batter of the old school, thinner and tangier than modern baking-powder versions. Nothing here is difficult, but the measurements are volumetric and the yeast reference is obsolete.
- A quart of flourMeasured by volume, this is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb or 500 g of all-purpose flour. With 3 cups of milk and 6 eggs the result is a pourable batter, closer to thick cream than to cake batter.
- A cake of yeastYeast cakes of the period came in several sizes (from a small compressed cake of well under an ounce up to two-ounce cakes), so a quarter cake is only approximate; figure a few grams of fresh yeast, which corresponds to something under half a teaspoon of active dry or less of instant. The alternative "3 tablespoonfuls" is most likely a liquid yeast or homemade barm rather than dry granules; do not measure modern yeast by the tablespoon.
- The overnight riseThis is the whole point of the recipe: the long ferment, not the eggs, does the leavening, and it gives the finished waffle its faintly sour, malty flavor. Cover the bowl and leave it at cool room temperature, 65-70F, for 8 to 12 hours.
- Eggs and milk left outA batter of raw egg and milk standing all night at room temperature is not how a modern kitchen would do it. Mix the flour, milk, salt and yeast at night, refrigerate, and beat in the eggs in the morning; the ferment will proceed more slowly but the flavor is the same.
- Stirring downThe instruction matters. The risen batter will be domed and bubbly; deflating it with a few strokes gives an even pour and keeps the waffles from erupting over the edge of the iron. Stir down again between batches.
- The ironWaffles of this vintage were baked in hinged cast-iron irons, either long-handled over the coals or set over a stove burner, and turned by hand. An electric iron at its medium-high setting works, but grease it well.
- YieldAbout 12 to 16 standard waffles, enough for six to eight people. Leftover batter can be held a day or so refrigerated, though it will grow more sour.
Martha Washington's name was attached to an enormous range of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century recipes, candies and household goods, usually with no documented connection to the woman herself; the attribution signaled colonial respectability rather than provenance. What is genuine here is the method. Waffles were baked in long-handled irons over coals in eighteenth-century American kitchens, and before chemical leaveners became cheap and reliable in the second half of the nineteenth century, a batter like this one was raised with yeast overnight — the same technique used for pancakes, buckwheat cakes and raised biscuits. It is a thrifty method: flour, milk, salt and a few cents of yeast do most of the work, and a long ferment builds flavor that would otherwise have to be bought with butter and sugar.