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Eureka Baking Powder

Bi-carbonate of soda, 16 ounces; tartaric acid, 12 ounces; cream of tartar, 2 ounces; fine flour 3 pounds.

There is two pounds of real baking powder and flour enough added to make five pounds weight. Starch has more the appearance of real baking powder than flour. Does not this go far to explain the variations in strength and the inducements to push the sale of cheap powders? Cost price of flour, 4 cents; starch; 10 cents; selling price of powder the difference. It being our sole business to teach how to make good bread and to inquire into the nature of the obstacles that throw us, we have no remedies to offer against these adulterations other than the first mentioned, viz: to use little or none at all, and employ good yeast instead. In the palmy days of French cookery, when culinary excellence was carried, under the auspices of fashion, to an extreme never surpassed since, baking powder was unknown, and the bakers' more objectionable carbonate of ammonia was unthought of. The finest cakes were made light either with brewer's yeast, like those at the end of this book; with air beaten in mechanically, like our common sponge cakes; or with the fine particles of cold butter as in pound cake-the same agent that imparts such extreme lightness to puff-paste. Waffles and pan cakes at the same time were made of extreme delicacy by means of white of eggs whipped to a froth, being really a mass of air bubbles, fine as snow, incorporated in the mixture, there to expand in the heat of baking and raise the whole. Baking powder is the cook's labor-saving friend, but if the friend be treacherous a d unreliable shall we not accept his good offices with caution? All we can gain from him is gas to expand into big holes in the bread in the oven, and a teaspoonful of soda to a pint of sour buttermilk yields the same. In "old fashioned" gingerbread a teaspoonful of soda added to the raw molasses makes a gassy foam just the same, and, independent of all the half dozen ways already shown of introducing air for lightness into food compounds, there is the purely mechanical utilization of atmospheric air of the following method.