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Southern Waffles
From the mush of white corn-meal left from breakfast take 1 cupful and mix with it ½ of a cupful of cream and 1 cupful of milk. Add the well-beaten yolks of 4 eggs, 1 scant teaspoonful of salt and sift in 1 pint of flour. Beat well, add 3 tablespoonfuls of melted butter, the egg whites whipped to a stiff froth, 1 teaspoonful of bakingpowder and more milk, if necessary, to reduce to a pour batter. Have the waffle irons hissing hot.
Grease with melted lard, pour in sufficient batter to half fill the irons and bake over a hot fire, turning the irons to cook both sides properly.
A thrift recipe built on leftover breakfast mush, which gives these waffles a soft, custardy interior rather than the crisp shell of a modern buttermilk batter. Most of the work is in the volume measures and the equipment.
- The mushThis assumes a pot of plain boiled white cornmeal porridge from breakfast, cooked with water and salt and now cold and set. If you are starting from scratch, cook fine white cornmeal in salted water until thick, then chill; you want a cupful of stiff, spoonable mush, not hot loose grits, or the batter will thin unpredictably.
- A pint of flourVolume by the pint means 2 cups, roughly 8 to 9 oz of all-purpose flour sifted. The batter should pour, not drop, from the ladle; the instruction to add more milk is not optional advice but the actual control on consistency.
- White versus yellow mealSouthern cooks meant white corn, which is milder and less sweet than yellow. Yellow cornmeal works but shifts the flavor and color noticeably.
- Baking powder at the endThe powder goes in last, after the whites, so the batter should be cooked promptly rather than rested. Sift it with a little of the flour instead if you want it evenly distributed without deflating the whites.
- Folding, not beatingThe four stiff whites are the lift here as much as the leavening. Fold them in with a spatula in two additions; if you beat them in as the word "add" might suggest, you lose the texture the recipe is after.
- Hissing hot ironsOn a stovetop cast-iron waffle iron this means preheating both faces until a drop of water skitters, then greasing lightly with lard or oil. The direction to turn the irons applies only to the old hinged stovetop pattern; an electric waffle iron cooks both sides at once, set to medium-high, about 4 to 5 minutes per waffle.
- Half fullHalf-filling is right. Cornmeal batter with whipped whites expands hard, and a full iron will push batter out the seam.
- YieldAbout 8 to 10 waffles in a standard iron, enough for four people. The batter does not hold well overnight; cook it all and reheat leftovers in a hot oven.
Waffles made with leftover cornmeal mush belong to a long American habit of building a second, better meal out of the remains of the first — the same logic that produced fried mush, scrapple, and bread puddings. The recipe's insistence on white corn-meal marks it as Southern: white dent corn was the standard field and mill crop across the South, and yellow meal is often said to have been regarded there as fodder corn well into the twentieth century. The batter also assumes a hinged cast-iron waffle iron set over a range top and turned by hand, the standard household tool before electric irons spread through the 1920s and 1930s; the instruction to grease with melted lard reflects a kitchen where lard, not vegetable shortening, was the everyday fat. Cream, four eggs, and butter make this a comparatively rich batter, whatever economy the cup of mush represented.