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Virginia Waffles
1½ cups boiling water 1/2 cup white corn meal 1½ cups milk 3 cups flour 3 tablespoons sugar 1¼ tablespoons baking powder 1½ teaspoons salt Yolks 2 eggs Whites 2 eggs 2 tablespoons melted butter Cook meal in boiling water twenty minutes; add milk, dry ingredients mixed and sifted, yolks of eggs well beaten, butter, and whites of eggs beaten stiff. Cook same as Waffles. WAFFLES. - Page 80.
STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE. - Page 84.
SHIRRED EGG. - Page 97.
EGGS À LA COMMODORE. - Page 97.
A cornmeal mush forms the base of these waffles, which gives them a crisp shell and a soft, slightly gritty interior. The batter must be built in stages and the whites folded in last.
- Cook the mush first, and let it coolTwenty minutes of simmering in boiling water turns the corn meal into a stiff porridge. Stir the milk in while it is still warm to loosen it, but let the mixture drop to lukewarm before the egg yolks go in or they will scramble.
- White corn mealFine white corn meal is meant here, not grits, polenta or self-rising cornmeal mix. Coarse meal will not soften enough in twenty minutes and leaves the waffles sandy.
- The baking powder amountThe printed page gives 1¼ tablespoons of baking powder, which is what the text now reads. Period books vary widely for 3 cups of flour, some calling for as much as 2 tablespoons, and the batter is in any case also lightened with beaten whites.
- Batter consistencyCornmeal continues to absorb liquid as it stands, so the batter will thicken noticeably. Thin it with a little extra milk to a heavy pouring consistency just before baking rather than at the start.
- Folding the whitesBeat the whites to soft-stiff peaks and fold them in with a light hand as the last step. Overmixing here costs the waffles most of their lift, as the mush is heavy.
- The ironAn electric waffle iron on a medium-high setting suits this batter; a stovetop iron should be hot enough that a drop of water skitters. These need a longer bake than a plain flour waffle, roughly 4 to 5 minutes, to set the cornmeal and crisp the crust.
- YieldAbout eight to ten waffles from a standard square iron, enough for four to five people.
Cornmeal waffles turn up throughout nineteenth-century American cookery, and the "Virginia" label attached to them in northern cookbooks often signals the Southern habit of putting corn into many forms of bread, including batter cakes cooked between hinged irons. Scalding meal into mush before adding it to a batter appears widely in books of the period as a way of softening corn meal. The waffle iron itself was a hearth tool long before it was a stovetop or electric one, and breakfast cakes like these belonged to the era when hot bread was expected at the morning table rather than bought the day before.