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Tenth Day: Waffles
No. 138-BUFFALO WAFFLES.
One pound flour, two ounces butter, one quart milk, one gill of rice boiled in three of water, two even tablespoonfuls baking powder, two teaspoonfuls salt, two tablespoonfuls corn meal, four eggs. Melt the butter in the hot rice; sift the flour and powder together; beat the eggs very light, and pour in half of the milk, the flour, salt and rice; beat thoroughly, and by degrees add the other pint of milk, which should not be more than lukewarm. In baking, be careful to leave room in the iron for rising. "Next comes a recipe for waffles without yeast or soda, which I shall take the liberty of re-christening."
No. 139-GENEVA WAFFLES.
One pint of milk, one pint one and a half gills of flour, two oz. of butter, three eggs, half a teaspoonful of salt. Melt the butter in the milk, and when sufficiently cooled mix it with the flour and salt; beat the whites and yolks separately, stir the yolks in the batter, and then the whites, very lightly.
No. 140-BARBY'S WAFFLES.
One and a half lbs. of flour, one pint or less of boiled rice, two and a half pints of sweet, rich milk, one teaspoonful of salt, four eggs. Put the rice in a four-quart bowl, separating the eggs, putting the yolks with the rice; add the salt, flour, and two pints of the milk, beating very thoroughly, then the remaining half pint of milk; beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, add them to the batter, and beat well together. When thoroughly beaten, make the batter still lighter by lifting and pouring it with a tin cup for five minutes. "Which of these shall we try, aunty?" "The second, I think, although I should prefer either of the others, but we want something very simple, that will not detain you late in the kitchen. We haven't thought of any sweet-cake yet." "Let's have some with fruit in," said Mabel, "because I like to stone the raisins." "Here is a very nice recipe for that, and one that ought to be made to-day, because it wouldn't cut in nice slices if we put it off till to-morrow. Then in the morning we can make some jumbles so as to have a little variety; besides which, some people are afraid of fruit cake." No. 141-AURORA CAKE.
Eleven oz. butter, one and a half pints sugar, two and a half pints flour, half a pint milk, one gill mixed wine and brandy, one and a half lbs. stoned raisins, a quarter of a teaspoonful baking powder sifted with the flour, five eggs. Cream the butter, add the sugar and yolks and beat until very light; stir in the milk, add alternately the whites beaten to a dry froth, and the flour, then the wine, and lastly the fruit; bake in deep pans, buttered, and lined with paper. "There's some business for you, Mabel; it will take you a long time to find all the seeds in a pound and a half of raisins. In the mean time, the rest of us will be getting the other ingredients ready."
By tea-time the next evening, three nicely dressed children were ready to take their places at the table; and when the visitors learned that the fresh tea-biscuit, the waffles and huckleberry cake, the rich, delicate jumbles and fine fruit cake, were the work of those little hands, they could scarcely believe their ears. "But we had to have help with the baking, you know," said Grace, who was too honest to take more praise than she deserved. "You musn't give us credit for that."
AUNT JANE'S COOKING CLASS. "That will all come in time," answered Mrs. Brown, "and I should be very proud if my little girls could make as nice things as those, even if somebody else did bake them."
Three waffle batters and a fruit cake, all measured the way a 19th-century kitchen measured: flour and sugar by the pint rather than the pound, liquids by the gill. The waffles are made for a hinged cast-iron waffle iron heated over the range, which is why every one of them warns, directly or by implication, about room to rise.
- Gills and pintsA gill is half a cup, four to the pint. "One pint one and a half gills of flour" in the Geneva waffles is about 2 3/4 cups; "one and a half pints sugar" in the cake is 3 cups; "two and a half pints flour" is 5 cups. Note the book measures flour by volume in some recipes and by weight in others — one pound of flour is roughly 3 1/2 cups.
- The rice in the Buffalo waffles"One gill of rice boiled in three of water" means 1/2 cup raw rice simmered in 1 1/2 cups water, used hot so the butter melts into it. Barby's calls for a pint of cooked rice. Both give a tender, slightly custardy waffle; break the rice up well or you get lumps that never disperse.
- Cornmeal and lukewarm milkTwo tablespoons of cornmeal in the first recipe is a very small proportion, likely for texture rather than bulk. Adding the second pint of milk no warmer than lukewarm would help keep the eggs from setting against the hot rice.
- Baking powder strengthTwo even tablespoons of powder to a pound of flour is heavy by modern standards, working out at roughly 1 3/4 teaspoons per cup. Period powders were single-acting and varied in strength between brands, so a direct comparison with a modern tin is inexact. About one and a half teaspoons per cup of flour is the usual modern upper limit before the batter tastes metallic.
- Geneva waffles have no leavenerThey rise entirely on the beaten whites, so fold them in at the last moment and bake immediately. Batter that stands deflates and produces a flat, leathery waffle.
- The ironThese are written for a stovetop iron heated and greased on both faces. In an electric waffle iron, fill only about two-thirds of the grid — the "room for rising" warning still applies, and rice batters expand more than you expect.
- Raisins with seedsMabel's long job of stoning a pound and a half of raisins is obsolete: buy seedless. Muscat raisins are closest in flavor to what the book had in mind.
- Baking the Aurora cakeThe original gives no temperature or time. A rich, fruited butter cake this size wants a slow oven, about 300–325F, in deep paper-lined pans, for something in the region of an hour and a half — test with a skewer rather than the clock. A quarter teaspoon of baking powder in 5 cups of flour is nearly nothing; the lift comes from creaming and from the whites.
- YieldThe three batters are not the same size: the Geneva is roughly half the quantity of the Buffalo or Barby's, so yields vary with the batter as well as with the iron. The Aurora cake is a large one and the recipe simply directs deep pans, buttered and lined with paper; as the text implies, it cuts better a day after baking.
Six Little Cooks; or, Aunt Jane's Cooking Class is generally attributed to Elizabeth Stansbury Kirkland and was published in Chicago in the late 1870s — a cookbook framed as a story, in which children are taught to cook by an aunt and the recipes arrive inside the conversation. That framing explains the interruptions here: the girls choose the simplest waffle because it is late, and the fruit cake is made a day ahead because it will not slice well fresh. Rice waffles of the Buffalo and Barby type belong to an older American habit of stretching wheat flour with cooked rice or cornmeal, a practice strongest in the rice-growing South but common wherever flour was dear; the rice also keeps the waffle moist under the long heat of a hand-held iron. The "re-christening" joke — renaming a soda-free waffle after Geneva — is the author's own, and a reminder that recipe titles in these books were often local, borrowed, or invented on the spot rather than descriptive of any place.