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Waffles
Crack into a basin three whole raw eggs, adding two tablespoons sifted flour, half saltspoon salt, two tablespoons fine sugar, three tablespoons cream and half saltspoon grated nutmeg. Then with a whisk briskly beat the whole well together for five minutes. Lightly butter a frying pan and heat it well on the range, then pour into the pan one and a half tablespoons of the batter and make a very nice thin pancake; cook for two minutes on each side; place on a hot dish, dredge a little powdered sugar over and proceed to make the other five in same way, serving very hot.
Despite the title, this is not a waffle in any modern sense: no yeast, no leavening, no waffle iron. What the instructions actually describe is a rich, eggy thin pancake, closer to a crêpe or a Viennese Palatschinken, cooked in a frying pan.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoon is an eighth of a teaspoon. That applies to both the salt and the nutmeg here.
- The batter is mostly eggThree eggs to two tablespoons of flour gives a very loose, custardy batter. This is deliberate — it sets by coagulating egg rather than by cooking starch — but it means the pancakes are fragile and should be turned with a wide, thin spatula.
- Five minutes of whiskingBy hand this is the right order of magnitude: you want the sugar dissolved and the flour completely smooth, with no lumps to break the surface of a very thin pancake. A hand mixer does it in about a minute.
- Pan heatMedium, not high. Butter on high heat will brown and speck the pancakes before the interior sets, and this batter's sugar content makes it scorch faster than a plain crêpe batter.
- Two minutes a side is too longA pancake made from one and a half tablespoons of batter is done in 45 to 60 seconds on the first side and about 30 seconds on the second. Held for the full four minutes it dries out and turns leathery at the edges.
- Cream"Cream" in recipes of this period covered a range of richnesses, from something like today's single or light cream up to much thicker farm cream. Half-and-half is a safe reading; heavy cream works but thickens the batter noticeably.
- YieldSix small pancakes, as the text says — a dessert or breakfast portion for two people, or one generous one. The quantities double cleanly.
- ServingThese collapse and toughen as they cool. Dredge with powdered sugar and send them out as they come off the pan rather than stacking a batch in a warm oven.
The word waffle comes through Dutch wafel from the same root as wafer, a root generally connected with weaving and with the honeycomb pattern pressed into the batter between hinged irons. By the turn of the twentieth century that link had loosened in print, and compendious "international" cookbooks of the period sometimes filed a dish under a familiar English heading that only roughly fitted it. What is described here belongs to the family of thin sweet egg pancakes, dusted with sugar and served immediately, which appears in French kitchens as the crêpe and in Austrian and Hungarian ones as Palatschinken. A batter of this kind needs no resting time before it goes on the range.