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Danish Waffles
Beat 1 pound butter until creamy with 1/2 pound sugar, add yolks of 6 eggs, 1 pound of flour, 1 quart of warm milk, and the whites, beaten stiff. Bake in a waffle iron and dust each with sugar, when serving, with jam or preserves. This can be made in half the recipe, as this amount makes 24.
A rich, unleavened batter that rises on beaten egg whites alone, which makes the folding the whole trick. The quantities are for a household party; halving is sensible, as the recipe itself suggests.
- Fold, do not beatThere is no baking powder or soda here, so the stiff whites are the only lift. Fold them in last with a light hand and bake the batter promptly, before it slackens.
- Weights in cupsOne pound butter is 4 sticks (2 cups), 1/2 pound sugar is about 1 1/8 cups, and 1 pound flour is roughly 3 1/2 cups. Weighing is more reliable than scooping for the flour.
- Warm milk, soft butterA quart of warm milk added to creamed butter will curdle the mixture if the milk is hot; aim for lukewarm and add it in a few additions, alternating with the flour, to keep the batter smooth.
- The ironFor a book of this date this would most likely have meant a hinged cast-iron waffle iron heated on the range and turned by hand. An electric iron works, but this batter is thin and very buttery, so use less per waffle than you would for a modern recipe and expect it to spread.
- GreasingWith this much butter in the batter you need very little on the plates, though the first waffle from a cast-iron iron will nearly always stick and should be treated as the test piece.
- Colour and timingButter- and yolk-rich batters brown fast. Pull them at pale gold rather than deep brown; the sugar in the batter will carry them past crisp into bitter if left.
- YieldThe full recipe gives 24 waffles by the book's own count, so about 12 servings of two. Half the recipe fills a normal breakfast table.
- ServingDust with granulated or confectioner's sugar the moment they come off the iron and serve with jam, as written. They soften quickly and are not improved by holding in a warm oven.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a turn-of-the-century American genre of "foreign" cookery collections, in which dishes were gathered from correspondents and travellers abroad and set down for home cooks who would never see the countries named. Waffles have a long history in Scandinavia, where vafler are often baked in a heart-shaped iron — the wider Nordic convention most strongly associated with Norway — and served warm with sugar and jam or preserved berries rather than as a syrup-drenched breakfast plate, which is exactly the serving suggestion preserved here. The absence of any chemical leavening is worth noting: beaten egg whites were the older method, and recipes of this kind survived alongside baking-powder batters well into the twentieth century in rich cake-like waffles meant for the dessert or coffee table.