Fannie Farmer

Plum Pudding, Boiled—and Baked

Posted December 2016

By Stephen Schmidt

Plum Pudding, or Christmas Pudding

On the evening of November 7, 1862, Catharine Dean Flint staged a formal company dinner for eleven people in her elegant Boston home. An elaborate affair by today’s standards, her dinner included two dessert courses, the first of which featured a plum pudding. When we hear the words “plum pudding,” we visualize a dense, dark, shiny mound that comes to the table dramatically wreathed in brandy flames. The British and Irish still serve plum pudding at Christmas today, albeit under the modern name “Christmas pudding,” but most Americans seem to associate it with English Christmases of the past, most famously, perhaps, that of the Cratchit family in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. It is indeed an old-fashioned pudding, nothing like the cold, creamy desserts that we call puddings today, but rather a sort of dense suet pound cake stuffed with raisins—the “plums.” It is served piping hot, with “rich sauce,” as most puddings once were served.

But this was not, in fact, the pudding that Mrs. Flint served at her dinner on November 7, 1862. Mrs. Flint wrote extensive notes about this dinner, as she did about all of her entertainments, in her manuscript cookbook, which is now in the possession of the American Antiquarian Society, in Worcester, Massachusetts. And in these notes Mrs. Flint remarks, approvingly, that the pudding was served turned out of “the dish in which it was baked.” Classic plum pudding, the kind that comes to the table in flames, is not baked: it is boiled in a cloth bag or, more commonly today, steamed in a ceramic pudding basin or in a fluted metal steeple mold. But American women knew another kind of plum pudding too, which was baked, and it happens that Mrs. Flint’s cookbook contains a recipe for the baked sort of plum pudding—an unusually firm baked plum pudding that proves easy to unmold from its baking dish. The donor of the recipe, “Madam Salisbury,” was likely the mother of Stephen Salisbury II, a frequent guest in the Flint home.

Madam Salisbury’s Plum Pudding

Elizabeth Tuckerman Salisbury (1768-1851), by Gilbert Stuart (courtesy of Worcester Art Museum)

Half a loaf of bread soaked two hours in one quart of milk. Butter the size of an egg. Two heaped spoons of sugar and seven eggs beaten with the sugar and strained on to the bread after it is cold. Pint bowl full of raisins – two tea spoons salt. One even tea spoon cloves a little cinnamon. Bake two hours.

Madame Salisbury’s Plum Pudding

If you are wondering why plum puddings were once so highly esteemed, the simple answer is that, historically, raisins were special. When the English nicknamed raisins “plums” or “little plums” (which happened around the time of the Restoration, in 1660), they were affiliating the fruits with comfits, or dragées, which the English called “sugar plums.” Sugar plums were fancy and festive, and the English, historically, thought the same of raisins, both the large “raisins of the sun” and the small “raisins of Corinth,” which the English called “currants.”¹ Writing in 1617, the English traveler and social commentator Fynes Moryson tells us that “the use of Corands of Corinth [is] so frequent in all places, and with all persons in England, as the very Greekes that sell them wonder what we doe with such great quantities thereof, and know not how we should spend them, except we use them for dying, or to feede Hogges.”² In Moryson’s day, large and small raisins still found their way into many meat, poultry, and vegetable dishes, as they had since the thirteenth century. But the fruits were already beginning to be particularly associated with the many new sweet things then appearing on the scene, including sweet puddings, which were rapidly gaining favor with the English.

Although based on earlier precedents, boiled plum pudding, so named, did not emerge until the early eighteenth century. Through most of the century, it was, like other puddings, served in the first course of dinner, with the principal meats. And like several other raisin-rich comestibles—such as plum cakes (the ancestors of today’s fruitcakes and British Christmas cakes), plum pottage (a sort of spicy-sweet, fruited beef stew thickened with bread), and mince pie (from which Jack Horner extracted a plum)—plum pudding was a favorite at Christmas. The “Miss Caldwell cookbook, 1757-1790,” an English manuscript in the possession of the University of Iowa, showcases both plum pudding and smallish mince pies in the first course of a Christmas bill of fare, along with two other classics of the English Christmas feast: brawn (cold pickled pork) and “a sirloin of roasted beef.” A number of other English manuscript cookbooks of the period outline similar Christmas dinner first courses.

Miss Caldwell Cookbook Christmas Dinner Bill-of-Fare, First Course, page 124

Boiled plum pudding came to America early on—there are recipes in several eighteenth-century American manuscript cookbooks—and it duly shifted to the second course of dinner in the late eighteenth century, as it did in Britain. Still, American cookbooks imply that the pudding was never as wholeheartedly embraced in this country as in Britain. Harder-pressed American families—families whose circumstances were similar to the Cratchits’—seem rarely to have served it, even at Christmas. And while the American gentry did serve it, sometimes even apart from Christmas and New Year, many gentry cookbooks frame the pudding, in one way or another, as English, as though it were not fully naturalized here. Indeed, starting with Mary Randolph’s The Virginia House-Wife (1824), more than a few American cookbooks title their recipes English Plum Pudding. Perhaps America’s problem with the pudding was its abundance of plums, which made it expensive—or perhaps it was the booze, which many Americans already found objectionable by the 1840s. Or perhaps it was the suet, or beef kidney fat, which had to be cleaned and minced, a fiddly project that English women took in their stride but that American women seem always to have balked at. In addition, many American women no doubt shied away from the six-hour boiling, which someone (preferably “help,” which was always in short supply in America) had to supervise, shifting the pudding in the pot to maintain its round shape and topping up the water as it boiled away. Finally, there was the national “dyspepsia” crisis (or so it was perceived) of the antebellum decades and beyond, during which boiled puddings came to be considered unhealthily “rich” and “heavy.” In The Good Housekeeper, her cookbook of 1841, the redoubtable Sarah Hale warned, “As Christmas comes but once a year, a rich plum pudding may be permitted for the feast, though it is not healthy food; and children should be helped very sparingly.”

Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879)

Enter baked plum pudding. Baked plum pudding was essentially a simple bread pudding dressed up a bit: enhanced with plums, obviously (which plain bread pudding in the day did not have), and served hot with a rich sauce (while plain bread pudding was served “cool,” say the cookbook authors, and sauce-less). Baked plum pudding was in multiple ways friendlier to American sensibilities than its boiled counterpart. It had fewer plums than the boiled article and so was cheaper. It did not have booze (except in a very few highfalutin recipes), and while some recipes, in a nod to tradition, do suggest that suet can be used (a dreadful idea, in my view, as suet never melts sufficiently, if at all, in a baked pudding), these same recipes invariably say that butter will do just as well instead, “if you choose.” And most recipes call for butter only—and not for much.³ Even children could be permitted to indulge. And of course there was no six-hour boiling to fret over. An hour or so in an oven (or a Dutch oven) and the pudding was done.

Baked plum pudding shows up in some nineteenth-century British cookbooks, but I do not sense that British women were nearly as fond of it, or as reliant on it, as American women were.⁴ Here it became not only an “every woman’s” alternative to boiled plum pudding on holiday tables but also, as Mary Cornelius tells us, an all-purpose company treat that could be served either as a dessert or as a tea cake. In the 1859 edition of The Young Housekeeper’s Friend, Mrs. Cornelius advises her readers:

These puddings are served with a rich sauce, if eaten warm, but are excellent cold, cut up like cake. People that are subject to a great deal of uninvited company, find it convenient in cold weather to bake half a dozen at once. They will keep several weeks, and when one is to be used, it may be loosened from the dish by a knife passed around it, and little hot water be poured in round the edge. It should then be covered close, and set for half an hour into the stove or oven.

Mrs. Cornelius provides two recipes for baked plum pudding. Her first recipe, she says, can be made with soda crackers rather than bread, in which guise it was often called cracker pudding. Most nineteenth-century American cookbook authors have a recipe for cracker pudding, including Fannie Farmer, who features it in her Thanksgiving menu under the name “Thanksgiving Pudding.” Mrs. Cornelius’s second recipe is thus:

Soak a pound of soft bread in a quart of boiled milk till it can easily be strained through a coarse hair sieve; then add seven eggs, two gills of cream, a quarter of a pound of butter (melted), a gill of rose-water, or some extract of rose, a little cinnamon or nutmeg, and a pound of raisins. For a small family, bake it in two dishes, an hour; and reserve one for another day.

Students of historical American cooking may think that they have seen this recipe somewhere else—and indeed they have. It is a paraphrase of the recipe called “A Bread Pudding” outlined by Amelia Simmons in American Cookery (1796), our nation’s first homegrown cookbook. As I’ve said, historical American bread pudding did not have plums, so Simmons’s title is something of a mystery.

Amelia Simmons’s A Bread Pudding

A Bread Pudding

One pound soft bread or biscuit [crackers] soaked in one quart milk, run thro’ a sieve or cullender [colander], add 7 eggs, three quarters of a pound sugar, one quarter of a pound butter, nutmeg or cinnamon, one gill rosewater, one pound stone raisins, half pint cream, bake three quarters of an hour, middling oven.

It turns out that Catharine Dean Flint copied Simmons’s recipe verbatim into her manuscript cookbook, so it may have been Simmons’s baked plum pudding, not Madam Salisbury’s, that Mrs. Flint served at her dinner of November 7, 1862. Which is better? I would give the edge to Simmons’s pudding, which is sweeter, richer, and softer than Madam Salisbury’s and has the lovely flavor of rose water (which, despite the large quantity, is subtle). Still, Madam Salisbury’s pudding slices beautifully and has an appealing spicy flavor, and it is sweet enough if you interpret her “two heaped spoons of sugar” liberally. Adapted recipes for both puddings can be found here. Those fortunate to be subject to a great deal of company, uninvited or invited, over the holidays may find it convenient to have at least one in reserve.

[NOTES]

Currants, the berries, came to England in the sixteenth century. Initially, some English mistakenly believed that the berries, when dried, made raisins of Corinth. And so the berries, too, became “currants.” ↩
William Brenchley Wrye, England as Seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James I (London: John Russell Smith, Soho Square: 1865), 190. Retrieved December 3, 2016 from Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/englandasseenbyf00ryew ↩
While classic boiled plum pudding requires an equal weight of fat to bread (and/or flour), baked plum pudding has only a quarter weight of fat to bread or less. ↩
My hunch is that American baked plum pudding and British baked plum pudding evolved (fairly) independently. The American and British recipes differ in some details, and the uses of the recipes, as implied in the cookbooks, are also different. ↩

The Fateful Meeting of the Old English Stirred Custards with French Crème Anglaise

Posted July 2015

by Stephen Schmidt

In 1838, a well-to-do New York City woman, likely of the Hoppin family, recorded in her cookbook a dessert that she had served with great success to company so that she would remember how to serve it again. Consisting of two stirred custards—that is, saucepan custards—one made with the whites of eggs and the other with the yolks, the dessert played upon a white/yellow color scheme that was fashionable at the time in the serving of cakes. The writer’s extension of the conceit to the serving paraphernalia was typical.

When having company to dinner, as when the Whitneys were here for a dessert, make Lemmon Custards of the yolks of eggs, making them yellow, and take the whites of the Lemmon receipt with one or two more eggs for white boiled Custard seasoned with mace and orange peel pounded very fine and sifted so as not to speck them, and add a little cream. This is the answer instead of whips in the summer or any time. Put the custards into the low jelly glasses & serve them on the dinner table on the china custard stands, one white & one yellow, to look very handsome, or sometimes put the white custards in glass handle cups and set the yellow & white on the glass stand.

Hoppin Family Recipes, American, 1838-1841 (New York Public Library)

It is difficult for us today to grasp this dessert. We have never seen nineteenth-century jelly glasses, glass-handled custard cups, or custard stands, and we think of stirred custards as components of other desserts (like trifle or floating island) or as sauces, not as principal desserts. Above all, we are puzzled by the custards themselves, particularly the white one, made with egg whites. We do not understand how custard containing egg whites can be prepared in a saucepan. Won’t the result simply be a curdled mess? In fact, no. From the mid-1600s to the mid-1800s, the English-speaking world knew many stirred custards (or “creams,” as they were also called), both as desserts and as accompaniments to cake at evening parties. Many of these custards were thickened with whole eggs or with egg whites only, and when properly prepared these custards were perfectly smooth

Indeed, the most common type, plain stirred custard, or “boiled” custard—which was not boiled, of course; the name merely distinguished it from baked custard—was among this group. As originally made in Anglo-America, its basic ingredients were milk or cream, whole eggs, and sugar. But by 1884, when Mary Lincoln, the first principal of the Boston Cooking School, published her cookbook, the common wisdom on the eggs had shifted. “Boiled custard is much smoother when made only with the yolks of eggs,” Lincoln pronounced, dismissing traditional whole-egg boiled custard as inevitably lumpy. Regrettably, once egg white was deemed undesirable in plain boiled custard, all of the other traditional stirred custards that contained it fell under suspicion and, soon enough, these custards, too, were no longer made or even thought possible—and hence our bafflement at the Hoppin writer’s dessert.

Why did traditional whole-egg boiled custard disappear and take with it so many other lovely stirred custards? The term “crème anglaise” hints at the answer. This is the French name for plain stirred custard—and, nowadays, it is a typical American name for the custard too.*

Starting in the mid-seventeenth century, with the publication of ground-breaking cookbooks by La Varenne and other new-wave French chefs, (privileged) Anglo-America increasingly fell under the sway of Gallic culinary sorcery. Notwithstanding Franco-phobic pushback—and there was plenty of that—wealthy households on both sides of the Atlantic had adopted Frenchified (if not exactly French) fare for company occasions by the mid- nineteenth century (the English somewhat earlier than the Americans), and by the end of the nineteenth century, the upper-middle classes had followed suit. Meanwhile, French culinary ideas also permeated everyday cooking. French culinary signifiers like creaming, breading and deep-frying, patty shells, mayonnaise, meringue toppings, and many others are rampant in late-Victorian American cookbooks, especially in those of the influential Fannie Farmer, who was Mrs. Lincoln’s successor as principal of the Boston Cooking School.

Traditional boiled custard was swept up in this sea change. The French made plain stirred custard with egg yolks only, and since the French were presumed to always know best, the French way became the usual American way. To be sure, it did not help the cause of traditional whole-egg plain stirred custard that the custard is tricky, trickier than yolk stirred custard, which many home cooks find plenty tricky enough. Besides curdling at a lower temperature than yolk custard, whole-egg plain stirred custard has very little “tolerance.” While yolk stirred custard thickens gradually in a range of nearly twenty degrees, whole-egg custard only begins to thicken at around 160⁰F and then becomes as thick as it can get, without curdling, at 165⁰F. Just a degree or two beyond this point and—drat!—it’s ruined. Whole-egg stirred custard requires a knack that was quickly lost once the custard was no longer routinely made—and so the custard was deemed a bad recipe from the benighted (pre-French) past and was forgotten. This is a pity. Whole-egg stirred custard is perfectly smooth when carefully cooked, and to many tastes it is nicer than that made with yolks: thicker yet lighter on the tongue, with a delightful slippery quality.

An even greater pity is the loss of the many other lovely stirred custards that went to their grave along with traditional boiled custard, among them the Hoppin writer’s white and yellow desserts. Precisely how the Hoppin writer made her white stirred custard we cannot know, for she did not record the recipe in her cookbook. But we can speculate. Since she was after stark, unmistakably white custard, I would guess that she started with a recipe like the following (which was popular) and substituted whites for yolks and orange (and mace) for lemon. Apparently, she also replaced (most of) the cream called for in this recipe with milk. In testing, I discovered that this is possible but dicey, as milk, having less fat than cream, also provides less tolerance, making the custard more likely to curdle (or separate, which is what mine did, and which is less dire than curdling but still not what one wants). So I retested with cream and liked the result very much. My adapted recipe, “White Custard with Orange and Mace,” is posted in Adapted Recipes.

Lemon Cream

Eliza Leslie, Directions for Cookery, 1837

Beat well together a quart of thick cream and the yolks of eight eggs. Then gradually beat in half a pound of powdered loaf-sugar, and the grated rind of three large lemons. Put the mixture into a porcelain skillet and set it on hot coals till it comes to a boil; then take it off, and stir it till nearly cold. Squeeze the juice of the lemons into a bowl; pour the cream upon it, and continue to stir it till quite cold. You may serve it up in a glass bowl, in glass cups, or in jelly glasses. Eat it with sweetmeats and tarts.

The Hoppin writer did not write down a recipe for her bright-yellow lemon custard, either, but again we can speculate. It could not have been simply the Lemon Cream above or some version of today’s plain stirred custard with lemon. Made with cream or milk, these custards would have been too pale in color to have cut it in her color scheme. She must instead have made one of the old water-based stirred lemon custards (or “creams”), many of which were thickened with egg yolks and/or whole eggs and were vivid yellow. (There was also a popular version with egg whites only, which is transparent. Amelia Simmons, our earliest published cookbook author, has a recipe that is very much worth making.) These custards were tremendously fashionable in Anglo-America from the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s. But the French did not know them, and what the French did not know, fashionable late-Victorian America tossed out. What a loss! Contrary to modern expectations (at least mine), water-based stirred custards can be cooked to a higher temperature and have greater tolerance than milk-based stirred custards—even when whole eggs or, indeed, only egg whites are used. And they are lovely.

Water-based lemon custards thickened entirely with egg yolks taste unpleasantly eggy to me—and perhaps they did to people of the past as well, for most recipes call for whole eggs or egg whites. So, while the Hoppin writer apparently prepared her yellow custard with egg yolks only, I would prefer the following delicious, decidedly yellow custard, which is made with whole eggs—and whose yellow can be intensified by the addition of one or possibly two (but, to my taste, not more) of the yolks left over from the white custard. For my recipe, see “Yellow Stirred Custard with Lemon” in Adapted Recipes.

Lemon Cream

Mary Randolph, The Virginia House-Wife, 1824

Pare the rind very thin from four fresh lemons, squeeze the juice, and strain it—put them both into a quart of water, sweeten it to your taste, add the whites of six eggs, beat to a froth; set it over the fire, and keep stirring until it thickens, but do not let it boil—then pour it in a bowl; when cold, strain it through a sieve, put it on the fire, and add the yelks of the eggs—stir it till quite thick, and serve it in glasses.

*Ironically, the term “crème anglaise” translates as “English cream,” not because the French believed that the custard was an English invention but because they perceived it as characteristic of the English. At least one other custard, now forgotten, also shows up under the same name in seventeenth-century French cookbooks.

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.