Stephen Schmidt

English Gingerbread Old and New

Posted September 2014

This post originally appeared on the Recipes Project blog, on December 21, 2012, and was reposted on the New York Academy of Medicine blog “Books, Health and History” on February 5, 2013.

Food writers who rummage in other people’s recipe boxes, as I am wont to do, know that many modern American families happily carry on making certain favorite dishes decades after these dishes have dropped out of fashion, indeed from memory. It appears that the same was true of a privileged eighteenth-century English family whose recipe book now resides at the New York Academy of Medicine, under the unprepossessing title “Recipe book : manuscript, 1700s.” (MCS title: English Receipt Book Headed “Wines, Sweetmeats, & Cookery,” mostly 1700 – 1740.) The manuscript’s culinary section (it also has a medical section) was copied in two contiguous chunks by two different scribes, the second of whom picked up numbering the recipes where the first left off and then added an index to all 170 recipes in both sections. The recipes in both chunks are mostly of the early eighteenth century—they are similar to those of E. Smith’s The Compleat Housewife, 1727—but a number of recipes in the first chunk, particularly for items once part of the repertory of “banquetting stuffe,” are much older. My guess is that this clutch of recipes was, previous to this copying, a separate manuscript that had itself been successively copied and updated over a span of several generations, during the course of which most of the original recipes had been replaced by more modern ones but a few old family favorites dating back to the mid-seventeenth century had been retained. Among these older recipes, the most surprising is the bread crumb gingerbread. A boiled paste of bread crumbs, honey or sugar, ale or wine, and an enormous quantity of spice (one full cup in this recipe, and much more in many others) that was made up as “printed” cakes and then dried, this gingerbread appears in no other post-1700 English manuscript or print cookbook that I have seen. And yet the recipe in the NYAM manuscript seems not to have been idly or inadvertently copied, for its language, orthography, and certain compositional details (particularly the brandy) have been updated to the Georgian era:

25 To Make Ginger bread

Take a pound & quarter of bread, a pound of sugar, one ounce of red Sanders, one ounce of Cinamon three quarters of an ounce of ginger half an ounce of mace & cloves, half an ounce of nutmegs, then put your Sugar & spices into a Skillet with half a pint of Brandy & half a pint of ale, sett it over a gentle fire till your Sugar be melted, Let it have a boyl then put in half of your bread Stirre it well in the Skellet & Let it boyle also, have the other half of your bread in a Stone panchon, then pour your Stuffe to it & work it to a past make it up in prints or as you please.

English Recipes for “Wines, Sweetmeats, & Cookery,” 1700 – 1740

From the fourteenth century into the mid-seventeenth century, bread crumb gingerbread was England’s standard gingerbread (for the record, there was also a more rarefied type) and, by all evidence, a great favorite among those who could afford it—a fortifier for Sir Thopas in The Canterbury Tales, one of the dainties of nobility listed in The Description of England, 1587 (Harrison, 129), and according to Sir Hugh Platt, in Delightes for Ladies, 1609, a confection “used at the Court, and in all gentlemens houses at festival times.” Then, around the time of the Restoration, this ancient confection apparently dropped out of fashion. In The Accomplisht Cook, 1663, his awe-inspiring 500-page compendium of upper-class Restoration cookery, Robert May does not find space for a single recipe.

The reason for its waning is not difficult to deduce. Bread crumb gingerbread was part of a large group of English sweetened, spiced confections that were originally used more as medicines than as foods. Indeed, the earliest gingerbread recipes appear in medical, not culinary, manuscripts (Hieatt, 31), and culinary historian Karen Hess proposes that gingerbread derives from an ancient electuary commonly known as gingibrati, whence came the name (Hess, 342-3). In England, these early nutriceuticals, as we might call them today, gradually became slotted as foods first through their adoption for the void, a little ceremony of stomach-settling sweets and wines staged after meals in great medieval households, and then, beginning in the early sixteenth century, through their use at banquets, meals of sweets enjoyed by the English privileged both after feasts and as stand-alone entertainments. Through the early seventeenth century banquets, like the void, continued to carry a therapeutic subtext (or pretext) and comprised mostly foods that were extremely sweet or both sweet and spicy: fruits preserved in syrups, candied fruits, marmalades, and stiff jellies; candied caraway, anise, and coriander seeds; various spice-flecked dry biscuits from Italy; marzipan; and sweetened, spiced wafers and the syrupy spiced wine called hippocras. In this company, bread crumb gingerbread, with its pungent (if not caustic) spicing, was a comfortable fit. But as the seventeenth century progressed, the banquet increasingly incorporated custards, creams, fresh cheeses, fruit tarts, and buttery little cakes, and these foods, in tandem with the enduringly popular preserved and candied fruits, came to define the English taste in sweets, whether for banquets or for two new dawning sweets occasions, desserts and evening parties. The aggressive spice deliverers fell by the wayside, including, inevitably, England’s ancestral bread crumb gingerbread.

As the old gingerbread waned, a new one took its place and assumed its name, first in recipe manuscripts of the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and then in printed cookbooks of the early eighteenth century. This new arrival was the spiced honey cake, which had been made throughout Europe for centuries. It is sometimes suggested that the spiced honey cake came to England with Royalists returning from exile in France after the Restoration, which seems plausible given the high popularity of French pain d’épice at that time—though less convincing when one considers that a common English name for this cake, before it became firmly known as gingerbread, was “pepper cake,” which suggests a Northern European provenance. Whatever the case, Anglo-America almost immediately replaced the expensive honey in this cake with cheap molasses (or treacle, as the English said by the late 1600s), and this new gingerbread, in myriad forms, became the most widely made cake in Anglo-America over the next two centuries and still remains a favorite today, especially at Christmas.

By the time the NYAM manuscript was copied, perhaps sometime between 1710 and 1730, molasses gingerbread was already ragingly popular in both England and America, and evidently the family who kept this manuscript ate it too, for the second clutch of culinary recipes includes a recipe for it, under the exact same title as the first. Remembering the old adage that the holidays preserve what the everyday loses, I will hazard a guess that the old gingerbread was made at Christmas, the new for everyday family use.

150 To Make Ginger Bread

Take a Pound of Treacle, two ounces of Carrawayseeds, an ounce of Ginger, half a Pound of Sugar half a Pound of Butter melted, & a Pound of Flower. if you please you may put some Lemon pill cut small, mix altogether & make it into little Cakes so bake it. may put in a little Brandy for a Pepper Cake

An interesting question is why the seventeenth-century English considered the European spiced honey cake sufficiently analogous to their ancestral bread crumb gingerbread to merit its name. It may have been simply the compositional similarity, the primary constituents of both cakes being honey (at least traditionally) and spices. Or it may have been that both cakes were associated with Christmas and other “festival times.” Or it may have been that both cakes were often printed with human figures and other designs using wooden or ceramic molds. Or it may possibly have been that both gingerbreads had medicinal uses as stomach-settlers. In both England and America, itinerant sellers of the new baked gingerbread often stationed themselves at wharves and docks and hawked their cakes as a preventive to sea-sickness. (Ship-wrecked off Long Island in 1727, Benjamin Franklin bought gingerbread “of an old woman to eat on the water,” he tells us in The Autobiography.) One thinks at first that the ginger and other spices were the “active ingredients” in this remedy, and certainly this is what nineteenth-century American cookbook authors believed when they recommended gingerbread for such use. But early on the remedy may also have been activated by the treacle. Based on the perhaps slender evidence of a single recipe in E. Smith, Karen Hess proposes that the first English bakers of the new gingerbread may have understood treacle to mean London treacle (Hess, 201), the English version of the ancient sovereign remedy theriac, a common form of which English apothecaries apparently formulated with molasses rather than expensive honey. I have long wondered what, if anything, this has to do with the English adoption of the word “treacle” for molasses (OED). Perhaps a medical historian can tell us.

Works Cited
Harrison, William. The Description of England. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1994
Hess, Karen. Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.
Hieatt, Constance and Sharon Butler. Curye on Inglysch. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
“Treacle, I. 1. c.” The Compact Oxford English Dictionary. 2^nd ed. 1991

Mrs. Goodfellow and Miss Leslie

Posted September 2014

by Stephen Schmidt

Eliza Leslie (1787-1858)

As a child, Eliza Leslie had no plan to become a cookbook author, much less the finest and most influential American cookbook author of the second third of the nineteenth century. She was born in 1787, the eldest of five children of Robert Leslie, an eighteenth-century Philadelphia philosophe, who made watches by day and spent his evenings discussing science, mathematics, and the ongoing invention of the American republic with Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and other friends from the American Philosophical Society. From 1792 to 1797 Mr. Leslie brought his family to London, where he attempted to expand his watchmaking into an export business, and where the young Eliza, haphazardly educated at home, began to mature into a constant reader and mildly acerbic intellect whose ardent hope was one day to see her name in print. Alas, Mr. Leslie’s business plans failed, as did his health, and after his death, in 1803, his wife was compelled to open a genteel boardinghouse to keep the family afloat. As helpmate to her mother in this enterprise, Eliza Leslie found herself having to supervise a staff, including a cook, about whose doings she knew little. Fortunately, a famed Philadelphia confectioner by the name of Mrs. Goodfellow had opened a cooking school in her shop—the first school of its kind in America. Here, Leslie recorded, in copious detail, recipes which made the Leslie boardinghouse famous—and recipes which, even many years later, when Leslie had become a successful writer, mostly of children’s stories and short fiction, her friends constantly importuned her to share. Finally, her brother Charles Robert Leslie (who had stayed behind in England and become a well-known painter of historical scenes) convinced Leslie to publish these recipes as cookbook, which she did, in 1828, titling it Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats, by A Lady of Philadelphia. At the time there were only a handful of American cookbooks in print—most American women still cooked out of British cookbooks—and it was perhaps Leslie’s promise, in her preface, that her recipes were “in every sense of the word, American” that impelled her “little book” to enormous popularity, appearing in innumerable editions practically to the end of the nineteenth century.

Although Leslie continued to publish fiction and journalistic pieces into the 1840s, garnering several prizes along the way, the success of Seventy-Five Receipts inevitably lured her into rechanneling her career toward books of domestic management, for she was unmarried and self-supporting. In 1837, Leslie brought forth a general-purpose cookbook titled Directions for Cookery in its Various Branches, which sold at least 50,000 copies in various printings and editions (an astonishing achievement in the day), and, in 1846, a somewhat tonier cookbook, The Lady’s Receipt-Book, which met with somewhat lesser but nonetheless impressive success. Still more cookbooks, as well as a “behavior” (or etiquette) book, appeared in the 1850s. By this time Miss Leslie (as she had come to be known) was ensconced as a full-time resident of Philadelphia’s United States Hotel, where she comported herself as the grand figure she was, visiting with the hotel’s many celebrated guests and signing the autograph books of the many admirers who sought her out.

Mrs. (Elizabeth) Goodfellow (1768-1851)

It has always intrigued me that Leslie’s remarkable career was built on the work of a confectioner and cooking teacher named Mrs. Goodfellow—and I have always wondered if it really was. Since the beginning of Anglo-American cookbook publishing, cookbook authors have been wont to buttress the authority of their recipes by attributing them to respected or famous persons, whether royalty, first ladies, the socially prominent, or well-known cooks. Mrs. Goodfellow might seem too obscure a figure to elevate as recipe godmother, but she was in fact renowned even beyond the environs of Philadelphia. Indeed, following Mrs. Goodfellow’s death, in 1851, at age 83, a woman who identified herself only as “A Good Housekeeper and a pupil of Mrs. Goodfellow,” published a cookbook titled Cookery as It should Be, which the publisher crowed was “sure to be well received” given its source, which was, at least ostensibly, the noted confectioner. In point of fact, very few of the receipts in this 362-page tome date from Mrs. Goodfellow’s heyday, and if Eliza Leslie actually did copy her Seventy-Five Receipts from Mrs. Goodfellow, as Leslie claimed, our Good Housekeeper must have been a very poor note taker, for no more than two or three of Cookery’s recipes overlap with Seventy-Five Receipts.

Thus it was with great anticipation that I approached a manuscript cookbook in the possession of the Clements Library of the University of Michigan, which appears in the library’s catalogue under the title “Mrs. Goodfellow Receipts, 1860-1870,” and which contains twenty-three recipes explicitly identified as belonging to the famed confectioner (along with 175 or so others, which are later). Presumably copied by a pupil of Mrs. Goodfellow, the manuscript would seem to corroborate Miss Leslie’s claims as to origins of Seventy-Five Receipts. Fully eleven of the manuscript’s Goodfellow recipes are manifestly versions of recipes appearing in Leslie’s little cookbook, and two are versions of recipes outlined in Leslie’s later Directions for Cookery. In addition, five of the manuscript’s Goodfellow recipes bear an obvious relationship to recipes in Seventy-Five Receipts; that is, although Leslie chose not to print these recipes, she imported distinctive elements of them into her own recipes for the same items. Only five of the manuscript’s Goodfellow recipes do not show up in any form in any of Leslie’s works. Or at least I do not think they do: Leslie published thousands of recipes over the course of her career, and while I think I have seen them all, I probably have not—and I certainly do not remember all that I have seen.

Obviously, I cannot say for certain that the recipes in the Goodfellow manuscript cookbook were copied verbatim from Mrs. Goodfellow. Nor can I say that Mrs. Goodfellow taught the same recipes for the same items throughout her teaching career. In fact, speaking as a cooking teacher myself, I would be surprised if she did. But if we assume, for the sake of argument, that the recipes in the manuscript are the originals from which Miss Leslie worked, we can discern just how canny Leslie’s appraisal of her readers’ needs and aspirations was. From the start of her career, Leslie positioned herself as a cookbook author who, on the one hand, was willing to make reasonable compromises for the sake of practicality but who, on the other hand, remained an unabashed exponent of what was then called “rich cooking.” In the second third of the nineteenth century, this was precisely the right appeal for the audience Leslie presumed, the supremely ambitious upper-middle classes, who, though beset by anxieties amid the day’s ruinous economic cycles and increasingly bitter North-South divide, were nonetheless determined to live well and express a genteel identity through fancy-dress evening parties featuring lavish displays of food. For this audience Leslie cleverly reconfigures the manuscript’s Goodfellow recipes to make them just a bit richer and more highly (and more imaginatively) flavored, without significantly increasing their cost and complication. Leslie’s pound cake has twelve drops of lemon essence and an entire nutmeg, where the manuscript version has only six drops and a few scrapings. Leslie’s Apees (a sort of crisp-crumbly cookie) are made with wine and rose water and feature three tablespoons of caraway seeds, while the manuscript’s Apees (abbreviated as A. P.’s) are made with water and have only “a few” seeds. Leslie enriches her Milk Biscuits with butter and eggs, while manuscript’s recipe for the same calls for only flour, milk, and yeast. Leslie’s Almond Pudding has twice as many almonds as the manuscript’s recipe for the same, and her Coconut Pudding has twice as many beaten egg whites. And so it goes. In no instance does Leslie make a recipe plainer, although she does sometimes make it more practical. For example, all of the manuscript recipes for puddings in puff pastry crusts yield four tiny puddings. Leslie reconfigures these recipes to yield one medium-size pudding, on the assumption, I think, that one medium-size pudding would be sufficient for most women’s purposes and, if not, it would be easy enough to double the recipe.

The recipes in the manuscript that Leslie chose to leave behind are interesting for another reason, and this brings us to the cookbook ostensibly sourced from Mrs. Goodfellow but actually not. By the end of her career, the tiny, parochial, overwhelmingly culturally English America of Leslie’s youth had been swallowed up by a far larger, rapidly industrializing and urbanizing, and increasingly diverse and factionalized America. Food and cooking had changed in tandem, the prevailing taste of the times, at least as exhibited in the many cookbooks now on the market, having shifted from an essentially British, upper-class, eighteenth-century cuisine, freighted with rich, expensive ingredients and many practical difficulties, to a much simpler, easier, more naturalized cuisine that truly was “in every sense of the word, American.” Many of these changes did not please Leslie at all, especially one: women’s ever-escalating reliance on chemical leavening, whose common forms today are baking soda and baking powder.

Alkaline chemical leavenings (that is, baking sodas) had been used (in secret, it seems) by gingerbread bakers in northern Europe since at least as early as the sixteenth century. Commercial Dutch (and possibly German) bakers brought chemical leavenings to America, and by the late eighteenth century Americans were beginning to use these substances, heretofore regarded as adulterants, in home kitchens—the first people on earth to do so. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, most women remained wary of these substances, but most, including Leslie, countenanced their use in the “plain cakes” served to family and informal company at evening tea. However, the “fine cakes” that graced the tea tables and supper tables of evening entertainments were an entirely other matter. All good cooks considered chemical leavening an abomination in fine cakes, just as many European cooks today still do. Alas, by the time Leslie published her last cookbook, in 1857, just a year before her death, this barrier was being breached. Leslie had heard that some women were introducing alkalis to Golden Cake, a very fine cake but also a very tricky one. Predictably, she was appalled and railed in her recipe for this cake: “If you use soda, saleratus, hartshorn, or any of the alkalis, they will entirely destroy the orange flavor [of this cake], and communicate a bad taste of their own.” And then, a few pages on, at the end of a recipe for Spanish Buns (one of Mrs. Goodfellow’s particular specialties), Leslie drifts off into a bittersweet reminiscence of her days in Mrs. Goodfellow’s kitchen. There, she writes, only “good things” were made, and “the use of soda and other alkalis [was] unknown… hartshorn in cakes would have horrified her.”

Leslie was likely thinking of Cookery as It should Be when she penned these remarks. Although supposedly featuring Mrs. Goodfellow’s receipts, the book is full of chemically puffed-up cakes, including golden cake. Although this book was originally published by the same house that published Leslie, Leslie’s indignation was such that she savaged it in a review, first and foremost for its chemical horrors.

Pearl Ash (Potassium Carbonate)

This brings us to a puzzling issue. Four of the recipes in Seventy-Five Receipts call for pearl ash, the original American “baking soda,” and in the second edition of the book, published in 1832, Leslie replaces the book’s original soda-free gingerbread nuts (gingersnaps) with a pearl ash version. Did these recipes come from Mrs. Goodfellow, with her horror of alkalis? To judge from the Clements Goodfellow manuscript, they did not. None of Leslie’s chemically leavened recipes appear in this manuscript, and even more significantly, two of the cakes that Leslie raises with pearl ash in Seventy-Five Receipts, molasses gingerbread and the gingerbread nuts, show up in traditional, soda-free guise in the Clements manuscript. It bears mentioning that one of the Goodfellow recipes in the Clements manuscript, for the sweet buns called rusks (more often eaten fresh than dried, despite today’s understanding of rusks as toasts), does call for “a little pearl ash”—while Leslie’s rusks recipe in Seventy-Five Receipts does not. This, however, can be explained. The purpose of the pearl ash here is not so much to leaven the dough—the recipe specifies “yeast sufficient to raise it,” as was usual—as to ensure that the dough did not sour while rising, a common problem in the day, when yeast was often weak and slow-acting. Many women resorted to alkalis to sweeten soured yeast doughs; it is fascinating to see that Mrs. Goodfellow, too, apparently sanctioned this strategy.

Evidently, then, Leslie did not derive quite all of the recipes in Seventy-Five Receipts from Mrs. Goodfellow. Leslie was too forward-looking and too shrewd to do that. She knew that virtually everyone used alkalis in molasses gingerbreads and served alkali-leavened butter cakes to family and informal company at tea. Indeed, such cakes were proudly considered unique American inventions meriting patriotic titles bearing the names of revolutionary heroes (Franklin and Washington and Lafayette) or American cities. There was no way that Leslie could omit such cakes from Seventy-Five Receipts, and, in fact, she gave her readers two recipes, although she was ambivalent about the use of chemical leavening in one of these, her Lafayette Gingerbread. It was this careful balancing of fine cooking with practical considerations, reminiscent of the later Julia Child, who was an analogous figure in the twentieth-century American culinary scene, which brought Leslie such great success in the 1830s and 1840s, though it was also her scruples that relegated her to the sidelines by the 1850s. Her popularity may not have been enduring—no one’s is—but her influence proved to be. At least fifty of Leslie’s seventy-five receipts are still made in some form or fashion today.

Did the English, Too, Bring Dutch Waffles to America?

Posted September 2014

by Stephen Schmidt

Circle of Georg Flegel (1566-1638). From Wikimedia Commons

A few years ago, while reading the manuscript cookbook of the seventeenth-century English diarist John Evelyn,* I was surprised to come across a recipe called “To make Duch waffers”—or waffles. I had always been told that the English settlers of America knew nothing about waffles until they were introduced to them by Dutch settlers, and I had never questioned this story, for two reasons. First, the British do not eat waffles today, or at least they do not consider them a traditional British food. Second, there are no recipes for waffles in seventeenth -century English printed cookbooks, and I have seen only two recipes in eighteenth-century English cookbooks, and these recipes are easy to discount. Robert Smith offers what seems to be the first printed English recipe (as well as the first printed use of the word in English, says Wikipedia) in Court Cookery, published in 1725, but, goodness knows, anything might be fashionable at the Court. The other eighteenth-century English printed recipe of which I am aware is Elizabeth Raffald’s “Gofers,” in The Experienced English Housewife, published in 1769—if Raffald’s “Gofers” are, in fact, waffles. The peculiar word comes from the French gauffres, which can designate either wafers or waffles—the two are essentially thin and thick cousins—or some betwixt-and-between hybrid of the two, which is what Raffald’s “Gofers” appear to be. In any case, Raffald’s cookbook, like many other eighteenth-century English cookbooks, is filled with all sorts of obscure, pretentious French recipes that few of their readers had ever heard of, much less made. But Evelyn’s recipe turns out not to be an anomaly, for four of the six seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English manuscript cookbooks in the possession of the New York Academy of Medicine also have recipes for waffles. In three of these manuscripts, the word used in the recipe title is some cognate of “waffles.” In the fourth, the word is “gofers,” which actually designates two different recipes, one called simply “Gofers,” and the other “Dutch Gofers.” And what is the difference between them? So far as I can tell nothing. They appear both to be waffles. All of this strongly suggests that more than a few English were eating waffles from the late seventeenth century onward and that, therefore, waffles may have been popularized in America as much by English settlers as by the Dutch. This might partially explain why waffles were already so well known in colonial America that William Livingston, the aristocratic future governor of New Jersey, attended a “waffle frolic,” or waffle-centered supper party, in 1744. If American waffles were not so much a food fusion story as a fission story, they came here with a very big bang.

Elizabeth Duncumb’s Waffles

Five of the six waffles outlined in the NYAM manuscripts are, like Evelyn’s waffles, the usual seventeenth-century Dutch type. They are essentially buttery yeast-raised breads baked under pressure in a waffle iron, which makes them crusty and crunchy on the outside and tender and moist, almost custardy, within. In composition, they are the same as today’s “Belgian” waffles, but as made at the time, they may have looked and tasted somewhat different, as many of the old fireplace waffle irons had shallow grids and would have produced rather thin waffles with a high ratio of crust to crumb. But no matter what the iron, waffles of this kind are delicious, and so I have adapted the following recipe in the adapted recipes section of this site. The recipe comes from the 1791 manuscript cookbook of Elizabeth Duncumb, of the town of Sutton Coldfield, in Warwickshire.

To make Wafles good Take half a pint of Cream & a quarter of a pound of butter, melt the butter over the fire with three or four spoonful of the Cream, then put it into an earthen pot with half a pound of flour, three Eggs well beaten with one spoonful of sack (or raisin or white Wine) & a little salt, let it run through a hair sieve, put it into the pot again, take half a spoonful of barm mixt with a little Milk, put that thro: the sieve, stir all together & cover it close with a Cloth, set it by the fire near two hours then butter your Irons & bake them & send them to Table with Wine Sauce—

Approved Receipts Waffles

One of the NYAM waffles recipes, from an anonymous late seventeenth-century English manuscript titled “Approved Receipts in Physic,” is an outlier. Its batter is essentially rice porridge stiffened with eggs. My good friend Dutch-American culinary historian Peter Rose is not aware of any Dutch precedent for this recipe, so it is quite possibly an English adaptation, perhaps inspired by the similar rice pancakes of the day, for which English cookbook author E. Smith published a recipe in 1727. A culinary historian is always interested in a local adaptation of an imported recipe, for it usually implies long familiarity with the original dish. When I made these waffles, I found it necessary to stiffen the batter with wheat flour in order for the batter not to run, and I suspect that flour was intended but was inadvertently omitted. In any event, if you would like to try these somewhat painstaking but delicious waffles, you will find my revised recipe in the adapted recipes section.

To Make Duch Waffers Take about a quarter of a pound of rise boyl it in a quart of milk till it is thick yⁿ straine it throw a strainer yⁿ take 8 egges very well beat a pound of butter melted 2 spoonefull of yest and 2 of sugger a little salt beat all these together and let it stand before y^e fier halfe an hower to rise yⁿ beat it very well againe yⁿ bake y^m in your Irons pore butter in y^e holes and serve y^m

Pieter Aertsen (1508-1575), Still Life with Waffles and Pancakes. From Wikimedia Commons

According to Peter Rose, the seventeenth-century Dutch buttered their waffles hot and ate them with their fingers—both at festive meals and on the streets, where they were sold by vendors (which is interesting, of course, because it means that any English person visiting Holland would have seen waffles). In short, waffles, to the Dutch, were basically a sort of special bread. They were treats but hardly rarities: seventeenth-century Dutch paintings show waffles being enjoyed by common folk and gentlefolk alike. The seventeenth-century English, though, appear to have adapted waffles as what they called a “made dish,” a whimsical or fanciful dish, often of foreign extraction, generally served in the second course of dinner or supper and eaten with a fork and knife (or just a knife in households that did not use forks). The crucial clue is the sauce—melted butter enough to “pour” in the recipe directly above, but, in most other recipes, the day’s usual pudding sauce of butter, sugar, and wine, either “beat up thick,” as Evelyn suggests, or melted, as Elizabeth Duncumb seems to have in mind. The English serving conventions are important because they imply the kind of English households in which waffles were served: only the relatively well-to-do indulged in made dishes or dined and supped in courses.

If waffles, in England, were in fact a rather upper-class thing, it makes sense that we would find few recipes for waffles in early English printed cookbooks even if many (upper-class) English people ate them, at least on occasion. While English cookbook authors were generally all too pleased to print pretentious recipes, they would probably shy away from recipes that might strike their middle-class readers as simply ridiculous, as waffle recipes might if their middle-class readers did not own the specialized irons, which I think most did not. Fireplace waffle irons were essentially yard-long iron

Waffle Irons, Musée Lorrain. From Wikimedia Commons

Waffle Irons, Musée_Lorrain. Wikimedia Commons

tongs attached to thick iron plates; they were hinged either at the far end of the plates, like a nutcracker, or, less commonly, between the handles, like scissors. Waffle irons must have been fairly expensive in England, and a household would likely not invest in one unless it would be frequently used. And it probably would not be frequently used in most middle-class homes because waffles were a bit of a nuisance to bake. The heavy irons had to be propped just so before the fire and turned frequently and, obviously, they had to be watched closely. And according to Peter Rose, a single waffle takes six to eight minutes to bake in a fireplace iron, which means that producing enough waffles to fill a serving dish would take a half hour or more. In early nineteenth-century America, waffles were, in fact, a distinctly upper-class food, and while some privileged women did bake (or have their help bake) them at breakfast for family, they were mostly company fare. In addition to their continuing role in waffle frolics, parties, and suppers, waffles were considered among the nicest “warm cakes” to serve at a supper, or tea, to which company had been invited, and some hostesses also served them at dressier, more formal late-evening tea parties, though cookbook author Eliza Leslie objected, “lest the ladies’ gloves be injured with butter.” (Besides butter, most Americans of the day also sprinkled waffles with sugar and cinnamon.) In the mid-nineteenth century, when American women switched from cooking in the fireplace to cooking at stoves, waffles became somewhat less of a chore to produce, and they soon enough became a middle-class breakfast dish, often now served with maple syrup or molasses. Thus, Fannie Farmer organized her four waffle recipes, including one calling for cooked rice, in the “biscuits and breakfast cakes” chapter of her 1896 cookbook. Farmer’s waffles are all pleasant enough but not nearly as rich and delicious as their early English forebears. *Driver, Christopher, ed. John Evelyn, Cook: The Manuscript Receipt Book of John Evelyn. Blackawton, Totnes, Devon: Prospect Books, 1997.