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Raised Waffles
1¾ cups milk ¼ cup lukewarm water 1 teaspoon salt 2 cups flour 1 tablespoon butter Yolks 2 eggs ¼ yeast cake Whites 2 eggs Scald milk; add salt and butter, and when lukewarm, add yeast cake dissolved in water, and flour. Beat well; let rise over night; add yolks of eggs well beaten, and whites of eggs beaten stiff. Cook same as Waffles. By using a whole yeast cake, the mixture will rise in one and one-half hours.
An overnight yeast-risen waffle batter from Fannie Farmer's book, leavened with a compressed yeast cake rather than baking powder. The method is sound; only the yeast measurement and the iron need translating.
- The fractionsThe quantities as printed have lost their fraction marks: read them as 1¾ cups milk, ¼ cup lukewarm water, and ¼ of a yeast cake. The last is the one that matters, since the recipe's closing note contrasts a quarter cake (overnight) with a whole cake (an hour and a half).
- Yeast substitutionA compressed yeast cake of the period was small, commonly around 0.6 oz though sizes varied by maker, so a quarter of one is a very little yeast — on the order of ½ teaspoon of instant or active dry yeast, which is what makes a slow overnight rise possible. A whole cake would correspond to something like 1½ to 2 teaspoons of modern dry yeast.
- Scalding the milkBring the milk just to the point where it steams and shivers at the edges, around 180F, then let it cool to blood heat before the yeast goes in. Scalding was originally done to inactivate enzymes in raw milk; with pasteurised milk it mainly serves to melt the butter and warm the mix.
- Overnight riseAt modern room temperature the batter will be well fermented and slightly sour by morning. If your kitchen is warm, refrigerate it overnight instead and let it come back to room temperature for half an hour before cooking.
- Adding the eggsFold the stiffly beaten whites in last, with a light hand. The yeast supplies flavour and most of the lift; the whites supply the open, lacy interior, and stirring them down undoes the point of separating them.
- The iron"Cook same as Waffles" meant a hinged cast-iron waffle iron heated over a range and turned by hand. On an electric iron use a medium-high setting, grease it well for the first waffle, and let each one go until steam stops escaping — about 3 to 4 minutes.
- YieldTwo cups of flour gives roughly 6 to 8 waffles depending on the depth of the iron; enough for three or four people at breakfast.
Waffles reached American kitchens through Dutch and English cooking long before chemical leavening did, and yeast-risen batters like this one are the older form — the tang and the honeycombed crumb come from a slow overnight ferment rather than baking powder. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book prints both kinds side by side in this section, which catches the moment when the two systems were still competing: baking powder was cheap and reliable by 1896, but cooks who wanted the flavour kept a batter going overnight. The compressed yeast cake called for here was a late-nineteenth-century convenience, sold fresh in foil-wrapped squares and kept on ice, and the recipe's parting note about using a whole cake for a ninety-minute rise is a small concession to households that had not thought about breakfast the night before.