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About Baking Powder, and How Not to Use It

Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?--Twelfth Night.

After all that has been shown of the manner of making the best of bread without baking powder, it must be plain to see that the way to avoid the injuries arising from baking powder adulteration is to use good yeast instead. The use of powder does not need to be encouraged, it, like many other non-essential articles, is good in its place, but it is the lazy cook's resort; it tends to inferiority in cooking; it causes an expenditure of money for that which is not nutriment but which at its very best is but empty air and at its worst carries after the air a residue of poison. And yet baking powder is good to a certain degree. But how few can make baking powder bread anything but a sorry substitute for bread? In the mining and lumbering regions and such half-civilized places where men in haste and carelessness mix up a sort of biscuit, any way for the easiest, baking powder is used in such vast quantities as people who live where cooking is done might find impossible to believe. That its manufacture must be very profitable is shown in many ways; by the immense number of different brands, the number of new and expensive ways of putting it up in packages, and of employing agents, traveling equipments and printing and advertising, equaling the sewing machine business of patent times, or patent medicine business of all times, and this without any monopoly for any one. Besides the immense factories of the large cities most of the small cities and outfitting points of the west have firms engaged in the manufacture. Kansas City has one, Denver has two, and of these one alone advertises that it ships from three to four tons of powder per month to the mountain towns. At the same time car loads are arriving of perhaps forty different brands from the east.

Baking powder was first extensively advertised for sale and generally introduced about the years 1845 to 1850. Flaming posters appeared in all the towns calling it German yeast, or baking powder, claiming that a yield of about twenty pounds more bread from a barrel of flour could be had by its use than by yeast raising, on the ground that ordinary yeast changes a portion of the flour into air in fermentation, and claiming for powder the effect of eggs, and another saving. Chemists certificates were appended to say that the powder when evaporated in the bread left only an extremely small remainder, and that was but chloride of sodium, or common salt, and no disadvantage. Supposing the last to be true, it is on the presumption that either cream of tartar or tortaric acid are used in making the powder, and that they are so perfectly proportioned as to exactly counteract each other and banish each other in the form of air, from the bread. Otherwise a residue of one or other must remain, and other acids and alkalis may be used having the same or stronger effects but leaving still more harmful remainders. Both before and after the introduction of commercial baking powders pastry cooks used to make their own. But cream of tartar was found most unreliable because of lack of uniformity in its adulteration. Some samples would contain so much starch or worse matters that four teaspoonfuls were required to counteract one teaspoonful of soda. With tartaric acid ready powdered the same difficulty was experienced. Tartaric acid in crystals, powdered in a mortar at home as wanted, was the only reliable recourse to avoid having biscuit spoiled either one way or the other. The proportions are one teaspoonful of powdered tartaric acid to two of carbonate of soda-the reverse of cream of tartar proportioned. The Scientific American has published a number of different formulas for making baking powders. Many of the manufacturers accuse others of employing cheap but injurious substitutes for soda and acid, and here is a hint of another kind of deterioration.

A man came around a new western town offering to sell a receipt for making baking powder which was to effect a great saving to all consumers. The price asked for the precious bit of information was one dollar. When my turn came to be canvassed I told him that knowing of quite a number of baking powder mixtures already I had just fifty cents worth of curiostiy left to know what he had to impart. So for that sum I obtained the following: