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Virginia Waffles
Work in rice with tips of the fingers; 1/2 cup white cornmeal 1½ cups boiling water 1½ cups milk 2 tablespoons melted butter 3 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 2 cups flour 3 tablespoons sugar 1½ teaspoons salt 2 eggs, yolks and whites beaten separately Cook meal in boiling water 20 minutes. Add milk, then flour, sugar, baking powder and salt sifted together, yolks of eggs beaten until thick; butter and whites of eggs beaten together until stiff. Cook as waffles.
A cornmeal mush waffle: the meal is cooked to a porridge first, then thinned and lightened, which gives a crisp shell and a custardy interior. A few of the printed details need translating.
- Ignore the first line"Work in rice with tips of the fingers" appears to be a stray line of type carried over from elsewhere on the page; no rice appears in the ingredient list or the method. Nothing in this batter is worked with the fingertips.
- Read the fractionsThe original's run-together numerals are 1/2 cup cornmeal, 1 1/2 cups boiling water, 1 1/2 cups milk and 1 1/2 teaspoons salt.
- Calumet baking powderCalumet was a double-acting powder, and this book was issued as advertising for it. Any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes teaspoon for teaspoon: 3 level teaspoons.
- Cooking the mealTwenty minutes over direct heat will scorch fine modern cornmeal. Cook it in a heavy pan over low heat, stirring often, or set the pan in simmering water; it should be thick and no longer raw-tasting.
- Cool before the eggsThe mush must come down well below scalding before the milk and yolks go in, or the yolks will curdle into threads. Adding the cold milk first, as written, does most of that work.
- Whites last, and gentlyFold the stiff whites in with the melted butter at the very end and stop while streaks remain. Beating them through kills the lift the recipe depends on, and the batter is heavy with cooked meal to begin with.
- ConsistencyCornmeal mush thickens as it stands, so the batter may need another few tablespoons of milk if it sits. It should pour thickly, not mound.
- The ironWritten for a stovetop iron over a hot fire. On an electric iron use a medium-high setting and give these longer than a plain waffle — the cornmeal wants extra time to crisp, and the waffle releases cleanly only once it does.
- YieldSix to eight waffles at least, depending on iron size; enough for four or more.
Reliable Recipes was one of the small promotional cookbooks issued by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago in the early twentieth century, which is why the brand name is written into the ingredient list rather than the generic term. The waffle itself belongs to a long Southern habit of stretching or enriching wheat flour with white cornmeal — white meal, finer and softer than the yellow favoured further north, was the Virginia and Carolina standard. Cooking the meal to a mush before mixing is the same technique behind spoonbread and mush breads generally: it hydrates the starch fully, so the grain reads as tenderness rather than grit. Attaching a state name to a recipe was a common publishing convenience of the period and signals a style more than a documented origin.