1、2nd EditionPeter A.CiulloBAKINGSODABonanzaIn memory of Josephine Ciullo,Ida DeCiampis,and Alice Arcari,who brought dignity and love to good food and a clean home.ContentsAcknowledgmentsiIntroduction:Baking Soda,Naturally1Baking Soda Rises15The Household Alternative75The Environmental Alternative83Ba
2、king and Baking Soda103Recipes vvv 163The Alternative Baking Soda Alternative169Bibliography173IndexContents About the AuthorCreditsCoverCopyrightAbout the PublisheriAcknowledgmentsThanks,above all,to my familyClaudia,Marissa,and Adam.A special debt of gratitude is owed John Pote,for giv-ing me the
3、idea,and Jerry Reen,for sharing his his-torical perspective.Many thanks,as well,for the help and advice of the Hoffman family,Chris Lemmond,Tom Whitney,Dr.Wayne Sorenson,Steve Lajoie,Dr.William Jensen,and Jennifer Griffi n.IntroductionBaking Soda,NaturallyThat box of baking soda forgotten in your re
4、frigerator?It has a story to tell.Your entire interest in baking soda may be how well it keeps your perishables from smelling like Tues-days fi sh,but it is actually an amazing natural resource.Baking soda is the common name for sodium bicarbon-ate,a natural salt that touches your life from the insi
5、de out.Sodium bicarbonate is,above all,essential to the function-ing of the human body.It helps maintain the proper acid/alkaline balance of blood.It is the major vehicle of carbon dioxide transport from body tissue to the lungs.It is a pri-mary component of the duodenal fl uid that neutralizes stom
6、ach contents before they enter the intestinal tract.So-dium bicarbonate is also a component of saliva,where it helps to reduce the attack of orally generated acids on tooth enamel.For the uses we werent born with,sodium bicarbonate is available in virtually endless supply from the minerals trona and
7、 nahcolite,which supply the stuff in your refrigerator,and in briney lakes and lake sediments.Bicarbonate is also found in the worlds oceans,where nature uses it to help stabilize the carbon dioxide content of the earths atmo-sphere.ii Baking soda as a house hold staple was actually invented by its
8、consumers,not its producers.The use of baking soda to deodorize your refrigerator,dry-clean your dog,or clean everything from battery terminals to teeth was not con-trived on Madison Avenue.The scores of pop u lar baking soda applications featured in this book are really a testa-ment to consumer ing
9、enuity.Baking soda is a simple,cheap food ingredient for which generations of Americans have conceived some unusual,certainly unintended,but none-theless ingenious folk uses.While these folk uses grew as an all-American phenom-enon,most industrial uses are global.In addition to baked goods and mixes
10、,these include animal feeds,fi re extin-guishers,textile pro cessing,paper sizing,leather tanning,oil-well drilling muds,carpet cleaners,foam rubber,and paint strippers.Baking sodas unique attributes are even ap-plied to controlling toxic metals in drinking water,improv-ing waste treatment pro cesse
11、s,and reducing harmful smokestack emissions.Although it exists as an abundant natural resource,baking soda depends on sophisticated pro cessing to meet the strin-gent standards of quality and purity mandated for its many uses.This benefi cial amalgam of nature and technology may well be a worthy mod
12、el for our times.In an age of acute en-vironmental and ecological awareness,when chemicals are suspect and all things natural are preferred,baking soda has emerged as possibly the worlds“greenest”chemical.ImtroductionvBaking Soda Rises 3 Baking soda in America began,naturally enough,with baking.Its
13、foothold in American homes was based on its use as a leav-ening agent.THE PEARLASH EVOLUTIONThe discovery of baking soda began with potash,a crude potassium carbonate extracted from wood ashes.American colonists learned how to purify potash into the pearlash(a more concentrated potassium carbonate),
14、which became an important ingredient to their booming soap-and glassmak-ing businesses.By the mid-eighteenth century,production of potash and pearlash had grown from a cottage industry to a major commercial enterprise.The colonies,with treesto burn,began exporting huge amounts of these carbonates to
15、 En glands glass and soap factories as well.It was during the 1760s that the use of pearlash in baking became pop u lar.Bakers had been using tedious and diffi -cult hand kneading as well as long-rising sourdough starters to leaven bread.Pearlashs high potassium carbonate con-tent made it quite alka
16、line and was initially added as a natu-Baking Soda Bonanza4 ral counter to the sourness caused by the acids in sourdough.Bakers discovered,however,that besides sweetening the dough,pearlash accelerated its rising by liberating carbon dioxide gas bubbles as it reacted with the sourdough acids and bak
17、ing heat.This ability of pearlash to create in minutes the leavening gases that required hours from the natural sourdough yeasts revolutionized baking.The popularity of pearlash was fueled by two nearly con-current developments in the United States.In 1796,Amelia Simmons published the fi rst America
18、n cookbook,Ameri-can Cookery,which featured several recipes requiring pearlash.At the same time,Oliver Evans was pioneering the fi ne grinding of wheat into lighter,airier fl our.Almost at once,the home baker had pearlash,a growing body of in-structions on how to use it,and increasingly available fi
19、 ner fl ours.THE SODA ASH REVOLUTIONAlthough pearlash remained the premier industrial carbon-ate in America well into the nineteenth century,the Ameri-can Revolution convinced the governments and industries of western Eu rope that their rapidly expanding need of American carbonates was po liti cally
20、 and eco nom ical ly un-wise.There was precious little Eu ro pe an woodland left to sacrifi ce to wood ash,and the only natural alternatives were the limited supplies of crude carbonates produced from the ashes of seaweeds and plants.The situation became so alarming that the French Academy of Scienc
21、es offered a prize in 1783 for the best pro cess for converting common salt(sodium chloride)to soda ash(sodium carbonate).Nico-5 las LeBlanc won the prize in 1791 for his method of react-ing salt,sulfuric acid,coal,and limestone.Soon soda ash plants proliferated in Eu rope.The now plentiful local su
22、p-ply of sodium carbonate replaced imported American po-tassium carbonates.SALERATUSThe development of todays leavening bicarbonate from the industrial carbonates took different routes in Eu rope and America.Eu ro pe an chemists bubbled carbon dioxide gas through solutions of sodium carbonate to for
23、m the less alka-line sodium bicarbonate.This chemical was dubbed saleratus,meaning“aerated salt.”Saleratus was adopted by the medical community as a safe and effective treatment for acid stomach.By the 1830s,Americas home bakers had discovered that the sodium bicarbonate imported for medical use was
24、 a superior(albeit expensive)leavening alternative to pearlash or the American version of saleratus.It released its carbon dioxide quickly in recipes and was less prone to bitter aftertastes.American saleratus,potassium bicarbonate,was fi rst made by Nathan Read of Salem,Massachusetts,in 1788.He sus
25、pended lumps of pearlash over the carbon dioxiderich fumes of fermenting molasses.The dry pearlash absorbed the carbon dioxide,converting its potassium carbonate to potassium bicarbonate.By the early nineteenth century,brewers and distillers were making saleratus as a sideline in much the same way b
26、y taking advantage of the carbon diox-ide released from their fermentation vats.American salera-tus was less expensive than the imported variety,but it was not as pure and did not leaven as dependably.Baking Soda RisesBaking Soda Bonanza6 Americas bakers were ready for a saleratus that would work as
27、 well as the imported sodium bicarbonate but beas cheap as the domestic alternative.Two American entrepreneursone a doctor and the other a salesmanaccepted the challenge and provided the sodium bicarbon-ate,which in time became the baking soda found in nearly every home.THE DETERMINED DOCTORAs Ameri
28、ca discovered the advantages of saleratus over pearlash,Dr.Austin Church,a Yale graduate,started ex-perimenting with a new way to make sodium bicarbonate.On the basis of promising work begun in his kitchen in Ithaca,New York,Dr.Church decided to trade his medical practice for the commercial producti
29、on of saleratus.In 1834 he uprooted his wife and children and moved to Rochester.The pro cess Dr.Church perfected in his Rochester fac-tory started with the meticulous purifi cation of En glish soda ash.This refi ned sodium carbonate was then spread thinly over canvas-covered wooden frames stacked i
30、n a sealed room.For three weeks,this room was fi lled with hot gases containing carbon dioxide from coal-fi red ovens.By this dry carbonation method,the purifi ed sodium car-bonate was entirely converted to food-grade sodium bicar-bonate.It is not surprising that Dr.Church,with a physicians training
31、 in chemistry,saw opportunity and fi nancial secu-rity in the commercial manufacture of a pure sodium bicar-bonate.His choice of Rochester was equally well reasoned.Baking Soda Rises7 Following the opening of the Rochester and Lockport sec-tion of the Erie Canal in 1823,Rochesters proximity to the w
32、heat fi elds of the Genesee Valley had propelled it to the status of the leading fl our milling center of the United States.When the Church family arrived in 1834,Rochester had just recently received its city charter,Genesee Valley fl our had earned worldwide fame,and the Rochester mills were turnin
33、g out more than 300,000 barrels per year.Dr.Churchs intent presumably was to produce saleratus in bulk for sale to the far-fl ung customers of the fl our mills.The bulk saleratus business allowed the Church family an adequate existence,but apparently not an especially prosperous one.After a brief re
34、turn to doctoring in Oswego,in 1846 Dr.Church moved his family to New York City,where he and his entrepreneurial brother-in-law,John Dwight,founded John Dwight&Company.DWIGHTS SALERATUSDwight realized that the key to success,in addition to bulk sales to commercial bakers and drug companies,would be
35、to build a consumer franchise by selling packages of salera-tus through the retail trade.The busiest port of the nation proved itself an excellent headquarters;in their fi rst year of operation,distinctively red-labeled“Dwights Saleratus”was offered to New Yorks storekeepers in bags of one pound or
36、less.Within a few years,Dwights Saleratus capitalized on its claims of superior quality and value.It captured the New York market and started expanding into every inhabited part of the United States and eventually into Canada.Its Baking Soda Bonanza8 prime competition,especially in rural areas,came
37、from the well-established imported saleratus sold loose in kegs.But the distinctive red-wrapped bags of Dwights Saleratus be-came the bakers choice.By 1850,the American house wife could purchase Dwights Saleratus from the general store for 4/lb.,quite an improvement over the$1.25/lb.her mother had p
38、aid for the import in 1820.Success,of course,bred competition,as other manufac-turers saw there was money to be made in tapping this new market for low-cost,high-quality domestic bicarbonate.The 1860s witnessed new brands from small fi rms like Philadel-phias Burgin&Sons to the mighty Pennsylvania S
39、alt Man-ufacturing Company.The most effective competition to emerge from the 1860s,however,was from Dr.Austin Church.ARM&HAMMERIn 1865,the sixty-six-year-old Dr.Church retired from John Dwight&Company,and two years later helped his sons,James and Elihu Churchboth successful businessmen in their own
40、rightfound Church&Company.Recognizing there was suffi cient need in the rapidly expanding United States to accommodate a competitor with quality equal to Dwights Saleratus,they constructed a factory in Green-point,Brooklyn,devoted to the manufacture and sale of sodium bicarbonate.James had been a pa
41、rtner in the Vulcan Spice Mills,a Brooklyn mustard and spice business,from which he ac-quired the Arm&Hammer logo.This symbol represented the arm of Vulcan,Roman god of fi re and metalworking,Baking Soda Rises9 with hammer raised.While perhaps better suited to the spice trade,this trademark was dist
42、inctively recognizable and soon intimately associated with what became the countrys best selling bicarb.Dwights Saleratus eventually adopted a mem-orable trademark of its own,modeled on Lady Maud,afamous Jersey from the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Expo-sition.Soon thereafter it became known as Dwig
43、hts Soda,Cow Brand,and in time simply Cow Brand Soda.Cow Brand and Arm&Hammer Bicarbonate of Soda became the domi-nant products in the chemical leavening business,but the ri-valry was friendly and mutually benefi cial.In 1896,fi fty years after John Dwight fi rst sold Austin Churchs saleratus,and ne
44、arly thirty years after their busi-ness interests had diverged,their descendants re united the two leading bicarb producers into the Church&Dwight Company.To the merger Church&Company brought Arm&Hammer,the leading U.S.brand,while John Dwight&Company brought Cow Brand,the leading Canadian prod-uct.A
45、lthough the two companies were now joined and the sodium bicarbonate came from a single source,the two brands were kept distinct to capitalize on the consumer loy-alty each had earned over the years.This was rewarded with continued growth into the early de cades of the twenti-eth century,when the te
46、rm“baking soda”was fi rst used.This name was most likely intended to differentiate pure sodium bicarbonate from the baking powders in which it was just one of several ingredients.The power of brand loyalty was further demonstrated when Cow Brand Soda was discontinued in the United States after World
47、 War II.It was still the preferred brand in its birthplace,New York City,while Arm&Hammer domi-nated the rest of the country.Loyal New Yorkers stuck with Baking Soda Bonanza10 Cow Brand till the end,despite the manufacturers efforts to ensure customers that both brands were one and the same baking s
48、oda.Cow Brand likewise remained the domi-nant baking soda in Canada until 1992,when it fi nally was discontinued in favor of Arm&Hammer.BAKING AND BEYONDThe growth of baking soda into a house hold necessity dur-ing the second half of the nineteenth century was aided by the complex changes in a rapid
49、ly developing United States.Dwights Saleratus was born at nearly the same time as the nationwide tax-supported public school system.A literate society invited the still-thriving publishing phenomenon of cookbooks.Baking recipes routinely required saleratus,and in 1860 Dwights company started distrib
50、uting free recipe booklets of its own.The 1860s also saw the spread of baking powders and yeast cake as con ve nient new leavening agents,but these were found suspect by the infl uential stalwarts of the U.S.health food movement of those days.The railroads became the backbone of the United States,tr
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