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Waffles
2 cups flour 4 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 3/4 teaspoon salt 1 3/4 cups milk 2 eggs 1 tablespoon melted shortening Sift flour, baking powder and salt together; add milk to yolks of eggs; mix thoroughly and add to dry ingredients; add melted shortening and mix in beaten whites of eggs. Bake in well greased hot waffle iron until brown. Serve hot with maple syrup. It should take about 1 1/2 minutes to bake each waffle.
A standard leavened waffle batter from a baking-powder company's promotional book, written when waffle irons sat over a gas ring rather than plugging into the wall. It works as written, with a few adjustments for modern equipment and modern baking powder.
- Baking powder quantityFour teaspoons to two cups of flour works out at two teaspoons per cup, somewhat above the modern norm of one to one and a half. Royal was a single-acting powder, and with current double-acting powder two to three teaspoons total should give enough lift; the full amount can leave a faintly metallic edge.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirThe whites are beaten separately and folded in last for a reason. Once they are in, mix only until no white streaks remain — a batter beaten smooth at that stage collapses and bakes dense and leathery.
- ShorteningIn this period the word covers any solid fat: lard, vegetable shortening or butter, melted. Melted butter is the best-tasting choice here; add it warm rather than hot.
- TimingThe stated minute and a half suits a well-heated iron of the period. A modern electric iron takes three to five minutes, and the honest signal is steam: when the plume from the seam thins out, the waffle is done.
- Greasing"Well greased hot waffle iron" is literal for cast iron — brush both plates each time. Nonstick electric irons need a light coat on the first waffle only; more than that makes the surface fry rather than crisp.
- Resting the batterNot in the original, but five minutes off the heat lets the flour hydrate and the leavening start, and the waffles come out lighter. Do not let it stand much longer or the lift is spent before it reaches the iron.
- YieldRoughly four to six waffles depending on iron size — enough for three or four people. The batter does not hold well; bake it all and keep finished waffles in a single layer on a rack in a 200F oven rather than stacked, which steams them soft.
This comes from one of the baking-powder company cookbooks that circulated in American kitchens in the first decades of the twentieth century — recipe collections given away free or sold cheaply, in which the formulas specify the sponsor's brand by name. They were effective advertising and arguably a force in standardizing home baking, since they carried level measurements and fixed proportions at a period when many household recipes still ran on handfuls and teacupfuls. Waffles themselves are much older; the usual account credits Dutch settlers and their wafel irons with bringing them to North America, and yeast-raised versions were common until chemical leavening made a same-morning batter like this one possible. The pairing with maple syrup is a North American habit, and this recipe takes it as the default serving suggestion.