The name of the actual post is Who Knew? The History of Baking Powder Is Incredibly Dramatic, but I couldn't help but use the title of the Metafilter link. The development of baking powder was a game-changer for household bakers, who previously dealt with unpredictable yeast and experimental alternate leavening that might or might not work. That's the subject of the book Baking Powder Wars: The Cutthroat Food Fight that Revolutionized Cooking by food historian Linda Civitello. Jezebel talked with Civitello about the importance of baking powder.
So women were looking for something better. Some of the early things they tried interfered, they said you can’t use anything acid with this. You can’t use orange juice or lemon peel, it will negate it, everything interferes with everything. This tastes like ammonia, that one strips the paint off of floorboards. Give me something better. Women had gone as far as they could go and then scientists had to take over and cream of tartar and baking soda show up in the 1840s. That’s another mineral. It’s inert, it doesn’t care about temperature the way that yeast does. But cream of tartar and baking soda, again, had problems. If you didn’t put the cake in the oven right away—Catherine Beecher says you have to get it in immediately and you might have to try a couple of times. You can’t mix the batter and then go oh, where’s my pan? That’s another drawback.
Then you get Eben Horsford at Harvard, who’s got five daughters who are probably in the kitchen a fair amount. His treatise in 1861 on bread making—bang bang, 30 or 40 minutes, foolproof, there you go. That’s it! Absolute revolution.
The book then goes into the rights and marketing of baking powder, which is where the "wars" part comes in. Read the interview with Civitello here. -via Metafilter