Home › Bread › Waffles (Three eggs one quart sour milk)
Waffles (Three eggs one quart sour milk)
Three eggs, one quart sour milk or cream, one teaspoonful of soda, a little salt, two tablespoonfuls melted butter. Beat the yolks thoroughly; stir in the milk with the soda, with butter and lastly, the whites, beaten stiff. Use flour to make stiffer than pancakes. Bake in waffle irons. Serve very hot.
A plain sour-milk batter that relies on soda and beaten whites for lift rather than baking powder. The only real puzzle is the flour, which the original leaves entirely to judgment.
- Flour quantity"Use flour to make stiffer than pancakes" is the whole instruction, and it is genuinely unmeasured. With a quart of milk expect four cups or more; aim for a batter that mounds slightly on the spoon and falls off in a thick ribbon.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, not modern pasteurized milk left out, which spoils rather than clabbers. Use buttermilk, or a quart of milk with 2 tablespoons of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and rested 10 minutes.
- SodaOne teaspoon of soda per quart is on the light side by modern reckoning; the acid in a quart of buttermilk can carry closer to a rounded teaspoon and a half. Sift it with the flour rather than stirring it into the milk if you want it evenly distributed, and cook the batter promptly once mixed.
- Folding the whitesThe whites go in last and provide lift alongside the soda. Fold, do not beat, and stop while streaks are still visible.
- Waffle ironsThis meant a hinged cast-iron iron set over a stove burner and turned partway through cooking. An electric iron works directly: preheat fully, brush with fat the first time even on nonstick, and allow roughly 3 to 4 minutes per waffle until steam stops escaping.
- Serving very hotNot a flourish. Waffles soften within a minute or two of stacking; hold finished ones in a single layer on a rack in a 200F oven if you are cooking for a table.
- YieldA quart of liquid makes a large batch, roughly 10 to 14 waffles depending on iron size, enough for six to eight people. Halve it easily using two eggs and a pint of buttermilk.
Sour milk was not a defect in a nineteenth-century kitchen but a resource: milk kept in a cool cellar clabbered predictably, and the acid it developed was what made soda work as a leavener. Recipes of this era are often said to come in matched pairs, one version for sweet milk with cream of tartar or baking powder, one for sour milk with soda alone, and a cook chose according to what was in the pantry. Many of these recipes end with the terse direction to bake and serve very hot, and the waffles were eaten as they came, one or two at a time, rather than assembled into a platter.