WEEK
18
Waffling

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
—Mark Twain

It was Father’s Day, so I was having a special Father’s Day breakfast. That I made by myself. And ate by myself. While Anne was weeding in the garden and Zach and Katie were sound asleep.

It felt kind of weird. I’d told everyone that I didn’t need anything for Father’s Day and, for that matter, that we didn’t even need to observe Father’s Day—a holiday for my father, not me—but when my kids actually took me up on the offer, I found myself unexpectedly disappointed. Not even a “Happy Father’s Day” from anyone.

Serves me right.

For my special Father’s Day breakfast, I made a special bread, a delightful quick bread with egg and butter and baking powder, cooked in only three minutes between two hot metal grids. In other words, a waffle. Yes, a waffle is bread, and an interesting bread at that.* Most commonly, a waffle is made as a quick bread, meaning it is leavened with baking powder and baking soda, but waffles can be leavened with yeast. If, that is, you have the foresight to begin preparing your breakfast while still digesting your dinner.

The word waffle has the same origin as wafer, and in fact they are quite similar, each a flour-water mixture cooked between two hot, embossed metal plates. When the plates are close together and nearly flat, except for the etching of, say, a cross, the result is a Communion wafer. Change the etching from a religious symbol to a shallow grid, add some sugar, and your wafer takes the form of an ice cream cone. Now make the indentations on the iron much deeper, add some leavening, and your wafer becomes a waffle.

Breakfast waffles can be challenging to make at home, because a good waffle is crisp on the outside and soft and airy on the inside (not unlike a good loaf of bread). The indentations of the waffle iron, by increasing the surface area, contribute greatly to the crispness. So does the addition of more fat (I prefer melted butter to vegetable oil); by substituting fat for some of the water, the waffle steams less inside the iron, allowing it to crisp up. There are a number of other tricks various cooks employ for crispness, from adding more eggs to slipping in a little corn meal, but the waffles I was making this morning were in my opinion the best in the world and represented the realization of another earlier bread obsession of sorts, dating back to the mid-1980s, when we were on a family beach vacation in North Carolina.

At a local breakfast/lunch spot, the kind of place where the waitresses call you “hon” and your bone-colored coffee mug gets refilled whenever it falls below the three-quarter mark, we’d breakfasted on the best waffles we’d ever eaten. A card on the table boasted that they were something called Carbon’s Golden Malted waffles. A commercial mix, not a homemade recipe. This was great news. It meant I could make these at home. It took some work to track the company down in the pre-Internet age, but I eventually talked to someone at Carbon’s in South Bend, Indiana, and was directed to a distributor in Cincinnati, from whom I tried to order some mix.

“Our smallest quantity is fifty pounds,” I was told. I was fond of their waffles, but not fifty pounds fond. I turned to making my own but had no success whatsoever in duplicating Carbon’s 1937 “secret mix” of wheat and corn flour, malt, and unspecified flavorings. A full decade passed, and I’d despaired of ever having such a good waffle again, when I saw a squat circular can of “malted waffle mix” at our local market. The brand wasn’t Carbon’s, but the flavor was unmistakably Carbon. Even ten years later, I could tell. Turns out they sell it today under several brand names, including their own, all in the same circular cardboard container.

I took two lessons away from this experience. Homemade isn’t always better, and sometimes I get to win one. I learned one more thing that evening at dinner, when Katie discovered the left over waffles in the refrigerator.

“You made waffles this morning?”

“For Father’s Day,” I said pointedly.

There—it was out! How would they react? Katie looked at Zach, and they both looked at Anne, and finally Zach cleared his throat nervously and said, “Uh, Dad?”

I waited for the apology.

“Father’s Day is next Sunday.”

And I wouldn’t be making my own breakfast.