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What Baking Powder Is

BAKING POWDER is not a food, but it is a preparer of food. A great many people, through misleading advertisments, have been led to believe that they eat Baking Powder, but this is not the case. Baking Powder is put in the food, not to be part of it, like flour, but simply as a convenient means of making the breads, cakes and biscuits light and sweet; in fact, it is used only for the leavening gas it produces. When you mix certain substances, under the proper conditions, they combine, and through what chemists call a reaction, change their nature entirely. This is especially true of all mixtures giving off leavening gas in which it is found the substance left is in no way like the substance put into the mixture. In Baking Powders this is always the case. And the part left in the food-the part you eat-is entirely different from any of the original ingredients.

Cream of Tartar Baking Powders, which are so widely advertised as pure, are pure in the can, but through the reaction which takes place, they give off their gas, and leave in the food a residue of Rochelle Salts. Rochelle Salts is the active principle of Seidlitz Powders. As you can readily see, these Baking Powders can be advertised and guaranteed as pure, for the powder itself is pure. These manufacturers, advertising in this way, say or guarantee nothing in regard to the purity of the bakings made with their powders. One should always think of this fact when selecting a Baking Powder.

You should remember, and profit by your remembering, that a Cream of Tartar Baking Powder, leaves in the food seventy per cent of its weight in the form of Rochelle Salts. Calumet Baking Powder is chemically correct, as it is made by the most modern methods. Through the reaction which takes place in the baking, Calumet leaves in the food no Rochelle Salts, Tartaric Acid, Alum, Lime or Ammonia. The small amount of residue that remains in the food is a perfectly harmless substance, pure and wholesome in every respect. Be sure you get a Baking Powder that is not only pure in the can, but one that is absolutely pure in the baking. Calumet is guaranteed to be absolutely pure, not only in the can, but also in the baking.