Then puffs and wallops, rises to the brim,
Drinks the dry knobs that on the surface swim;
The knobs at last the busy ladle breaks,
And the whole mass its true consistence takes.”
On the right hand side of the fireplace was a brick oven with an opening into the ash pit in front of the door to receive the coals and ashes when the oven was sufficiently heated. This kind of oven is often called the “Dutch Oven,” but it lacks that distinctive feature of the Dutch oven, a door on the outside of the house opening into a small lean-to under which the baking was done. In front of the fireplace was the tin kitchen, in which all the roasting was done, having a long spit running through it to hold the meat or turkey, the basting being done through a door on its back. The baking of bread, if not done in the oven when it happened to be heated, was done either in a creeper or in a tin Yankee baker before the fire. Inside the jams hung the indispensable bellows, and the waffle irons, which were often called into use. I supposed as others did, that when waffle irons were first used they were a new discovery in the culinary art. But bless you, my young admirers of waffles, they were older than the country, and were brought from Holland by the Dutch. The irons were called by the Dutch “Izers.” In New York the waffles were called “Izer cookies,” in New Jersey “split cakes,” and in Philadelphia “squeeze cakes,” and finally became known as waffles, a name which seems to have been an abbreviation of “wafers.” As some of my readers may never have seen these irons, I will describe them as two iron handles, joined and worked like a pair of scissors, each having at its end a square or round plate five or six inches in diameter, fitting into each other and holding the dough, which is pressed, receiving the design cast in the inside of the plates. There is an old song remembered by Dutch descendants partly Dutch and partly English, which in its allusion to waffles shows the antiquity of the cakes, and which I submit to our high school scholars for translation:
“Ter roorches, ter roorches,
She mameche bucleche, borche
Ter roorches, ter roorches,
As me mither le waffles she boxes,
De butter la door de groches,