Home › Recipes › Waffles with Self-Raising Flour
Waffles with Self-Raising Flour
Or with baking powder, or buttermilk and soda. 2 pounds of flour. 2 quarts of milk (nearly.) 4 whole eggs. 12 yolks. 8 ounces of butter, melted. 1 basting-spoonful of syrup. 1 teaspoonful of salt. Powder, 2 teaspoonfuls if common flour be used.
Mix up just before the meal like battercakes gradually, with the milk in the middle of the flour to avoid lumps. The eggs should be thoroughly beaten.
A hotel-scale batter written for a professional cook, with proportions given by weight and the leavening treated as an afterthought. It scales down cleanly, but the quantities need translating before you start.
- Scale firstTwo pounds of flour and two quarts of milk yields roughly thirty waffles. A quarter batch — 8 oz (about 1 3/4 cups) flour, 2 cups milk, 1 whole egg plus 3 yolks, 2 oz melted butter — is the sensible domestic size.
- The egg ratio is the pointFour whole eggs to twelve extra yolks is what makes these rich and tender rather than merely crisp. The proportion is plausible in a pastry kitchen, where whites were being used up in icings and meringues and spare yolks accumulated.
- Basting-spoonfulA basting spoon is a large serving spoon, so read this as roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons of syrup; the capacity was not standardised. The quantity is small enough to read as browning and a trace of sweetness rather than sweetening the waffle.
- LeaveningTwo teaspoons of baking powder to two pounds of flour is far less than modern practice (about a teaspoon per cup), and the beaten eggs do much of the lifting here. If you use plain flour, expect a dense waffle at that rate.
- Buttermilk and sodaFor the variant, reckon about 1/2 teaspoon of soda per cup of buttermilk, replacing the sweet milk entirely and omitting the powder.
- Self-raising flourAmerican self-rising flour already contains both leavening and salt, so drop the added teaspoon of salt if you use it. Note also that it is a soft, low-protein flour, which suits waffles well.
- Mixing methodWell in the flour, milk poured into the centre, drawn in gradually — this is the standard nineteenth-century anti-lump technique and it still works. Stop as soon as the flour is wet; a few lumps beat a tough batter.
- "Just before the meal"With chemical leavening the instruction is literal: a mixed batter loses lift as it stands, and this yolk-heavy one thickens too.
- The ironThe recipe gives no instructions for the iron; in this period a cast-iron waffle iron heated over the fire or stove would be assumed. An electric iron on a medium-high setting works; grease it for the first waffle even though the batter carries 8 oz of butter.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the late nineteenth-century run of trade manuals written by working hotel and restaurant men rather than housekeepers, which is why the yield is measured in pounds and quarts and why a recipe can casually call for twelve yolks — a pastry department always had whites left over from icings and meringues, and spare yolks to use up in the other direction. Waffles themselves reached America with Dutch settlers (the word comes from the Dutch wafel), and long-handled irons held over coals were fixtures of American kitchens well before stoves. The title's real subject is the flour: commercial self-raising flour, generally credited to English baking patents of the 1840s and widely sold in the United States by the end of the century, let a cook skip measuring leavening altogether, and the recipe's offhand "or with baking powder, or buttermilk and soda" is a snapshot of a moment when three different leavening systems were all in daily use.