Home › Bread, Biscuits, Muffins and Waffles › Kentucky Waffles
Kentucky Waffles
Beat three eggs, whites and yolks separately. Add to the yolks two pints sifted flour, one pint sour cream, stir well and make batter thin with sweet milk. Add three tablespoonfuls of melted lard, a teaspoonful of soda dissolved in a little cold milk, and lastly the whites of the eggs. Bake quickly in hot irons.
A sour-cream waffle batter leavened by soda and beaten whites, written for a stovetop iron turned over coals. The measurements are by volume in pints, and the batter is meant to be thinned to pouring consistency by eye.
- Work fast once the soda goes inThere is no baking powder here: the lift comes from soda meeting the acid in the sour cream, plus air in the whites. Fold the whites in last, as directed, and start baking immediately rather than letting the bowl stand.
- Pints of flourTwo pints sifted flour is 4 cups, roughly 16 oz; one pint sour cream is 2 cups. Sift before measuring, as the original assumes, or you will end up with noticeably more flour than intended.
- "Sour cream" is not today's tubIn this period it usually meant raw cream left to sour naturally: thinner and tangier than commercial cultured sour cream, which is much thicker, so expect to need more milk to thin the batter.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured milk, as opposed to the sour cream. Whole milk. Add it a little at a time until the batter pours in a ribbon rather than mounding.
- SodaA teaspoonful of soda is baking soda; older books also call for saleratus, a related alkali used in much the same way. Dissolving it in cold milk first is worth doing, as it helps prevent the yellow-brown flecks and soapy patches you get from undissolved soda.
- Three tablespoonfuls of melted lardMelted butter or a neutral oil works, though lard gives the crispest crust. Let it cool slightly before it meets the batter so it does not cook the yolks.
- "Bake quickly in hot irons"The original iron sat directly on the range and was greased and flipped by hand. A modern electric waffle iron should be fully preheated on its highest setting, and greased even if nonstick, since this batter has less fat than most current recipes.
- YieldTwo pints of flour makes a large batch: figure well over a dozen waffles from a standard iron. The batter does not hold well; bake it all and reheat leftovers in a hot oven.
Waffle irons were standard equipment in nineteenth-century American kitchens long before electricity: long-handled hinged plates that were greased, filled, closed and set into the fire or over a range opening, then turned partway through. Recipes like this one belong to the soda-and-sour-milk school of baking that spread through American households from the 1840s onward, as cheap chemical leaveners let cooks raise a batter in minutes instead of waiting on yeast. The Kentucky attribution may reflect a common habit of the era's cookbooks, which labeled dishes by region to signal a style rather than a documented origin; here it suggests the dairy-rich, cream-and-soda batters associated with Southern breakfast cookery.