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Sweet Potato Waffles
Mix to a smooth batter half a breakfast cupful of sweet potatoes well boiled and mashed, together with four tablespoonfuls of flour and one each of butter and sugar, a saltspoonful of salt and a pint of milk. Bake the batter immediately in a hot waffle-iron, or, if desired, they may be baked on a griddle in the form of cakes.
A short, egg-free, leaven-free batter that behaves more like a thin griddle batter than a modern waffle mix. The proportions as printed are the thing to look at before you start.
- The batter is extremely thin as writtenFour tablespoons of flour and roughly half a cup of mashed potato to a full pint of milk gives something closer to crepe batter than waffle batter. If you want a waffle rather than a crepe, hold back much of the milk and add it only until the batter ribbons thickly off the spoon; the original quantity may be an error, or may assume a drier, starchier boiled potato.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup ran larger than a teacup, commonly reckoned at somewhere around 8 to 10 fluid ounces, so half a cupful is roughly 1/2 to 5/8 cup of mashed sweet potato. Measure it packed and lump-free; any fibre or string will catch in the iron.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon.
- No egg and no leaveningNothing here lifts or binds the batter, so the results will be dense and slightly custardy rather than crisp. It also means the batter must be spread thin and cooked through, or the centre stays gummy.
- "Bake immediately"Cooked sweet potato starch goes on absorbing liquid, so a batter left standing will thicken. Mix and cook in one motion.
- Heating the ironThe recipe assumes a hot iron and says nothing further about greasing. On an electric iron use a medium-high setting and brush the plates with butter or oil each time; a sugared, egg-free batter sticks readily.
- Sweet potato choiceBoil and drain thoroughly, then let the potato steam dry for a few minutes. Waterlogged potato is the usual cause of a batter that will not set.
- YieldAbout four to six waffles from a standard iron, or eight to ten small griddle cakes. Serve hot with butter and syrup, or alongside ham as a supper dish.
Sweet potato batters are often said to have been a Southern and Mid-Atlantic habit long before they reached New York hotel menus, and they follow an older logic in which cooked potato, rice or hominy stretched expensive wheat flour and added moisture to a griddle cake. Oscar Tschirky's The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896) is a vast, magpie compilation rather than a record of only what the hotel served, and pages like this one show him gathering up American regional home cooking alongside the French dishes the Waldorf was famous for. The waffle iron itself was a fixture of nineteenth-century American kitchens: long-handled hinged irons were set directly into the coals or over a range hole, which is why the instruction is to bake the batter in a hot iron, the heat being entirely a matter of the cook's judgement.