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Three-Egg Waffles
2 cups flour. 2 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 1¼ cups milk 1 tablespoon melted butter 3 eggs Mix and sift the dry ingredients; add the yolks of the eggs beaten and stirred into the milk; then add the melted butter and fold in the whites of the eggs. Bake and serve as directed under One-Egg Waffles.
A straightforward rich waffle batter, but the transcription as printed is incomplete and the baking directions live on another page of the original loose-leaf set. Read the notes before you start.
- The flour is missingThe ingredient list jumps from baking powder to salt with no flour; whether that omission originated on the original leaf or in the transcription cannot be told from this page. For 1 1/4 cups milk and 2 teaspoons baking powder, a waffle batter of this era would take somewhere around 1 1/2 cups sifted flour; treat that as a reconstruction, not the author's figure.
- "Bake" means the ironWaffles were baked, not fried, in the language of the period. The cross-reference to One-Egg Waffles would have covered heating and greasing a hinged iron and turning it on the range; a modern electric iron preheated fully and lightly brushed with oil does the same work.
- Fold, do not stir, the whitesThe beaten whites are what lightens this batter. Fold them in last with a spatula and use the batter within a few minutes, before the air collapses and the baking powder is spent.
- Baking powder measureTwo teaspoons would be in line with modern double-acting powder against the flour quantity reconstructed above, so no adjustment is needed -- but that rests on the reconstruction, not on the printed recipe. Batters raised with the single-acting powders then still in use wanted cooking promptly, which is good practice here anyway.
- Melted butterOne tablespoon is lean by current standards and the waffles will stick in a poorly seasoned or unseasoned iron. Grease the plates for the first waffle even if the manufacturer calls the iron non-stick.
- YieldThe original gives none. Expect four to six waffles from a standard round or square iron, serving three or four.
- Filed under Frozen DessertsThe section heading does not match the recipe. Why the leaf sits there is not recorded; the loose-leaf format, in which pages could be pulled and refiled by the owner, is one possible explanation.
Loose-leaf cookbooks like this one were sold as ring binders or boxed sets of detachable pages, the idea being that a housekeeper could reorder the leaves to suit her own kitchen and slip in clippings and handwritten cards of her own. It is an appealing system that may also account for the two problems on this page: a recipe that points to instructions printed elsewhere, and a waffle sitting in the frozen-dessert section. Graduated egg recipes were a common device in American cookbooks of the 1910s and 1920s, where one-egg, two-egg and three-egg versions of the same batter appear; it is often supposed that such variants let a cook match the dish to what the hens had produced that week, eggs being seasonal and expensive in a way they no longer are. Waffles themselves reached American kitchens through Dutch settlement, descending from the wafel of New Amsterdam, and by the time this book appeared the long-handled hinged iron used over coals was giving way to the flat stovetop iron and, in wired households, the new electric model.