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Waffles
Take one quart of flour, a tea-spoon of salt, a table-spoon of melted butter, and milk enough to make a thick batter. Mix thoroughly. Add two well-beaten eggs, and one measure each of acid and soda (or two heaping tea-spoons acid and one moderately heaping teaspoon soda) of Horsford's Bread Preparation; stir well, and bake at once in waffle-irons.
A plain phosphate-leavened waffle batter from the era when the leavening came in two separate packets. The main work of translating it is the Horsford's and the iron.
- Horsford's Bread PreparationA two-part chemical leavening sold as separate acid (monocalcium phosphate) and soda packets, with a small measuring scoop in the tin. It is simply an unmixed baking powder; about 4 teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder covers a quart of flour, in which case omit the soda entirely.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume, so this is roughly 4 cups, or about 1 lb 2 oz of modern all-purpose flour. Scooped rather than weighed, it will vary by an ounce or two either way.
- "Milk enough to make a thick batter"For 4 cups of flour expect somewhere near 3 to 3 1/2 cups of milk. Aim for a batter that pours thickly and levels slowly, closer to pancake batter than to cake batter; too thin and it runs out of the iron's hinge.
- Bake at onceThis is the hinge. Phosphate leavening reacts quickly on contact with liquid and most of the lift is gone within a few minutes, so the irons should be hot and greased before the acid and soda go in.
- The waffle-ironThe original means a hinged cast-iron iron set over the range and turned partway through, roughly 2 to 3 minutes a side. A modern electric iron at medium-high does the same job; the waffle is done when the steam slows to a thread.
- Fat and seasoningOne tablespoon of butter in four cups of flour is lean by current standards. Adding 2 to 4 tablespoons more melted butter gives a richer, softer waffle without touching the leavening.
- YieldRoughly 10 to 14 waffles in a standard 7-inch iron. Serve straight from the iron; held waffles steam themselves soft, though a rack in a 200F oven keeps them passable.
Horsford's Bread Preparation was the commercial form of the calcium phosphate leavening developed by the Harvard chemist Eben Horsford in the mid-nineteenth century, sold by the Rumford Chemical Works in Rhode Island, and it turns up frequently in American cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s. It came as two components, acid and soda, to be measured separately with the measure supplied with the product, which is why this recipe speaks of "one measure each" as though the reader owned it; single-can baking powders eventually made that arrangement obsolete. Waffles themselves were long established in American kitchens by way of Dutch and Northern European settlers, baked in long-handled hinged irons thrust into the coals or set on the range top.