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Cream Waffles
Ingredients: One pint of sour cream; one of flour; one tablespoon of corn meal; two eggs; one teaspoon of soda and one-half teaspoon of salt. Beat whites of eggs and yolks of eggs separately; mix with the beaten yolks the cream, flour, corn meal and salt; add the soda dissolved in a little sweet milk and finally the whites of egg beaten to a stiff froth. Bake at once.
A lean, tangy batter that relies entirely on cream for fat and on the soda-acid reaction for lift. Two details govern the result: what you use for sour cream, and how quickly you get the batter onto the iron.
- Bake at once means itThe soda begins working the moment it meets the acid cream, and there is no baking powder to give a second rise in the heat. Have the iron hot and greased before the whites go in, and cook the whole batch straight through rather than letting it stand.
- "One pint of flour"Both the cream and the flour are measured by the pint here, so read it as 2 cups of each. Two cups of sifted flour is roughly 8 to 9 oz by weight; the batter should pour thickly, not mound.
- Sour cream, then and nowIn 1911 this meant cream left to sour naturally — pourable, sharply acidic, and considerably thinner than the stabilized sour cream sold today. Modern full-fat sour cream thinned with milk to a heavy-pouring consistency, or equal parts heavy cream and buttermilk, behaves closer to the original.
- The soda in sweet milk"Sweet" milk simply means ordinary unsoured milk. Dissolving the soda in a spoonful or two first prevents the yellow-brown specks and soapy patches you get from dry soda in a thick batter.
- Why the cornmealA single tablespoon is too little to carry much flavour; the likeliest reason for it is texture, a slight grit that helps the surface stay crisp as the waffle cools. Fine or medium yellow meal works; coarse polenta grind will read as raw.
- No sugar, no added fatThe cream supplies the shortening, and the batter is unsweetened, so it takes a sweet or savoury topping rather than being eaten plain. Adding a tablespoon of sugar will brown them faster, so drop the iron temperature if you do.
- Folding the whitesFold in thirds with a light hand once the batter is otherwise finished. Beaten whites are the only insurance against a dense waffle if the cream is less acidic than the original assumed.
- YieldAbout 8 standard waffles, or 4 to 5 Belgian-iron rounds. On a modern electric iron, medium-high and roughly 4 minutes per waffle.
Waffles reached American kitchens through Dutch settlement and stayed popular for generations — the Butterick book says only "bake" and gives no heat or time, as period cookbooks routinely do. The recipe's real subject is thrift: on a household that kept a cow or bought unpasteurized cream, cream turned sour within a day or two in warm weather, and a batter leavened by soda reacting with that acid put it to use rather than throwing it out. Sour-milk and sour-cream quick breads fill this whole section of turn-of-the-century American cookbooks for the same reason, and they are often said to have faded from later editions once refrigeration and pasteurized dairy meant cream no longer soured on its own — it simply spoiled.