Waffles
3 tablespoons melted butter 14 cups milk 3 eggs Sift dry ingredients; add yolks well beaten, milk, butter and stiffly beaten whites, Beat well and cook on hot waffle iron. The waffle iron should be heated fifteen or twenty minutes before using and greased thoroughly with salt pork fat.
A plain separated-egg waffle batter of the type standard in American cookbooks around 1900, written for a cast-iron iron heated on the range rather than an electric appliance.
- The milk measure"14 cups milk" cannot be right for a batter using 3 eggs and 3 tablespoons of butter; the intended quantity is almost certainly 1 1/4 cups. Treat the figure as unreliable and judge the batter by consistency — it should pour thickly but still spread on the iron.
- The dry ingredientsThe instruction "sift dry ingredients" has no list attached to it in this text. A period waffle of this size would use roughly 2 cups flour, 3 to 4 teaspoons baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon salt; consult another recipe of the era rather than guessing.
- Separated eggs are the pointThe lift here comes from stiffly beaten whites folded in at the end, not only from the leavening. Fold them in with a light hand and cook the batter promptly — it deflates if it stands.
- Heating the ironFifteen to twenty minutes is right for a heavy cast-iron waffle iron over a burner, turned once or twice so both halves come up to heat. An electric iron on a medium-high setting needs only the time its indicator takes.
- Salt pork fatRendered salt pork fat was a common recommendation for greasing waffle irons in this period; being rendered, it carries almost no water and does not scorch at waffle heat. Any neutral oil or clarified butter does the same job; whole butter browns and sticks.
- Judging donenessA cast-iron iron gives no signal. Steam pouring from the seam means the waffle is still releasing water; when the steam slackens the waffle is set, which on most irons takes a few minutes a side.
- YieldWith the dry ingredients missing there is no reliable count; a batter of this order would give something like six to eight waffles depending on iron size. Hold finished ones on a rack in a low oven rather than stacked, which softens them.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and alongside the recipes that sold cocoa it carried a full complement of ordinary household cookery. Waffles were a griddle bread: batter cooked between hinged iron plates over the fire, a technique that long predates the electric appliance. The name comes into English from Dutch wafel, with relatives in Low German, words tied to the sense of honeycomb. Greasing the plates with salt pork fat marks the recipe as pre-refrigeration kitchen practice.