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Raised Waffles
One quart flour, one pint sweet, luke-warm milk, two eggs, a able -spoon melted butter, tea-spoon salt, half tea-cup good yeast.- Mrs. L. S.
Williston, Heidelburg, Germany.
A yeast-risen waffle batter of the kind that was standard before baking powder took over the breakfast table. The recipe assumes a cook who knows what a waffle batter should look like and a stovetop iron heated over coals.
- The measuresOne quart flour is about 4 cups (roughly 1 lb), one pint sweet milk is 2 cups. "Sweet" milk simply means fresh rather than soured or buttermilk.
- "Half tea-cup good yeast"This is liquid barm or a homemade yeast sponge, not a modern dry product, and it is the one measurement that cannot be converted directly. About 2 1/4 teaspoons active dry yeast (one packet) will raise this quantity of batter.
- "A able-spoon"A typesetting slip for tablespoon. One tablespoon of melted butter for a quart of flour is a lean batter by modern standards; two or three gives a crisper, richer waffle.
- The hinge: let it rise, then restMix flour, milk, salt, butter and yeast and leave the batter to ferment -- 1 to 2 hours in a warm kitchen, or overnight in the refrigerator, which gives the tangy flavor these waffles are made for. The eggs are best beaten in just before baking, after the rise, so the batter stays light.
- Batter consistencyIt should pour thickly, like heavy cream. Yeast batters thin as they ferment, so judge it after the rise and add a little milk or flour then rather than at mixing.
- The ironA waffle iron of this period was heated over the fire or on a range top, greased and turned by hand. On an electric iron use a medium-high setting and expect the batter to spread more and bubble more actively than a baking-powder batter; fill the iron a little less full than usual.
- YieldAbout 8 to 10 waffles, enough for four to six people. The batter keeps a day or two under refrigeration and improves in flavor.
Before chemical leavening was reliable and cheap, waffles were raised the same way bread was -- with barm skimmed off fermenting beer or with a bit of saved yeast sponge -- and the overnight fermentation gave them the faintly sour, deeply savory flavor that distinguishes them from the sweet quick-batter waffles that replaced them. The Dixie Cook-Book (1883) was assembled from contributed receipts, and the practice of printing the donor's name and town is why this one carries a byline from Heidelberg: American compilations of the period drew on churchwomen, club members and expatriate correspondents alike, and a Southern cookbook could quite comfortably credit a batter recipe to a Mrs. Williston in Germany. Yeast-raised waffles never quite disappeared -- they were revived in the twentieth century under names like "overnight" or "raised" waffles -- and the reason is the one the old cooks knew: the slow rise does something to the flavor that baking powder cannot.}