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Baking Waffles
Waffles, it must be owned, are the terror of hotel cooks in ordinary positions, chiefly because people will persist in taking waffles just before they begin the meal, waffles for the meal, and more waffles just after the meal, making nine hundred orders of waffles for three hundred persons. But as waffles make a house popular and are a means of distancing competition hotel stewards and proprietors often find it good policy to look upon waffles without prejudice, and provide for their extensive manufacture by furnishing the proper waffle range, thus saving a hand and no end of confusion, waste, smoke, inconvenience, profanity and disappointment. Of course this applies to large business. A stove and the common waffle irons may do very well for fifty persons-the guage of these receipts.
Sweet waffles burn so easily that they cannot be baked fast. When waffles do not brown fast enough add sugar or syrup. The only remedy for waffles sticking to the irons is to keep the irons in constant use with scraping and rubbing out with lard while hot, and avoid letting them burn with nothing in them. To bake waffles, pour in one side a spoonful of melted lard, shut up and turn over the iron two or three times and then place a spoonful of batter in each compartment. Shut and turn over to the fire frequently till both sides are brown.
This is a working note on handling waffle irons rather than a batter formula — the batters live in the surrounding recipes. Most of it still applies if you cook on cast iron over a burner; some of it becomes moot with an electric iron.
- The hinge: keep the irons hot and greasedSticking is a seasoning problem, not a batter problem. Heat the closed iron until a drop of water dances, grease it, and never let it sit empty over the flame long enough to scorch — burnt-on residue is what tears the next waffle apart.
- Stovetop ironsThe old hinged cast-iron iron sits in a collar over the burner and must be flipped so both plates cook. The recipe says only to turn it to the fire frequently until both sides are brown, so judge by colour and by the steam slowing at the seam rather than by a set time.
- LardA spoonful of melted lard poured into the closed, turning iron is the period way of coating both plates at once. Any neutral high-smoke-point fat does the same; butter will brown and stick before the iron is properly hot.
- "Add sugar or syrup" for colourSound advice, and the reason it works is caramelisation and Maillard browning. A little added sugar or syrup will darken a pale waffle — but it also lowers the temperature at which it burns, which is the warning in the paragraph above.
- Sweet batters need a cooler ironWhere a plain batter wants a hot iron, a sugared one wants moderate heat and a slightly longer bake. On an electric iron, drop a setting.
- "The gauge of these receipts"The book's waffle batters are scaled to about fifty servings; a "waffle range" was a purpose-built hotel stove holding several irons at once. Divide the batter quantities down hard for domestic use.
- Batter volumeA spoonful per compartment is right for shallow antique plates. A modern deep Belgian iron takes considerably more and will overflow if you follow the historical proportions — fill to about two-thirds and adjust from there.
The complaint that opens this entry — three hundred guests ordering nine hundred waffles — places it squarely in the American hotel dining room of the late nineteenth century, where breakfast was an all-you-can-order affair and a house could build a reputation on one griddle item. Waffle irons of the period were long-handled hinged cast iron, worked over an open fire or a stove collar and flipped by hand, and the "waffle range" the author recommends was a specialised hotel stove for the purpose. The waffle is generally said to have come to America with Dutch settlers, the word descending from Dutch wafel, and by the time this book was written it had long since stopped being a novelty; what was new was the industrial scale. Note too that the fat of choice is lard throughout — commercial vegetable shortening was not yet the kitchen staple it would become.