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Waffles
1½ cups flour
1 cup milk
½ teaspoon salt
2 eggs
3 teaspoons baking-powder
1 tablespoon fat
Mix the flour, salt and baking-powder, add the milk gradually, then the eggs, which have been beaten until very light, and the melted fat. Be sure that both sides of the waffle-iron are hot and that it is well greased. After baking each waffle, heat the iron a minute before putting in batter for the next.
A plain, reliable batter that predates electric irons; the technique notes are all aimed at a cast-iron waffle iron heated on a range top.
- Separate the eggsSeparate the eggs (optional) -- The recipe says the eggs should be "beaten until very light" but does not say to separate them; whole eggs beaten hard is the plain reading. Separating and folding in stiff whites at the end is an optional step that gives extra lift.
- "Fat" means what you haveMelted butter, lard or bacon drippings were all fair game. A tablespoon of melted butter or neutral oil is the modern default; the quantity is low by current standards, so expect a waffle that leans crisp and lean rather than rich.
- Baking-powder quantityThree teaspoons to 1½ cups of flour is 2 teaspoons per cup, on the strong side today and about half again the usual modern ratio. Period powders were single-acting and less consistent; 1½ to 2 teaspoons of a modern double-acting powder avoids a metallic aftertaste.
- Mix it lightlyCombine only until the flour disappears. Lumps are preferable to a beaten, developed batter, which turns waffles tough.
- Heating the ironThe instruction to reheat the iron for a minute between waffles is the hinge of the recipe. A stovetop iron loses serious heat with each batch, and a cool iron gives a pale, stuck waffle. An electric iron handles this itself, but still give it a moment to recover its indicator light.
- GreasingCast-iron irons must be greased for every waffle unless very well seasoned. Modern nonstick plates need nothing, and added fat will smoke and degrade the coating.
- YieldAbout four to six waffles depending on the size of the iron; enough for two to three people. The batter does not hold well and should be cooked as soon as it is mixed.
The Butterick Publishing Company was a pattern and magazine house, and its household books were aimed at the middle-class woman running a kitchen without staff, which is why the recipe is short, cheap and assumes no unusual equipment. Waffle irons of this era were long-handled cast-iron hinged plates set over a stove hole or burner and flipped by hand to cook both faces, which is exactly why the text insists that both sides be hot before the batter goes in. Electric waffle irons began appearing in American households in the early decades of the twentieth century, spreading widely only in the 1920s and 1930s, and gradually made the reheating instruction obsolete. The dish itself is far older, generally traced to Dutch and Northern European wafer baking and carried to America by Dutch settlers, though by 1900 the plain, chemically leavened breakfast waffle was common, with yeast-raised versions of earlier centuries still printed alongside it in cookbooks.