To understand how the '76 Steelers can turn into the '08 Lions, we need to back up a bit and talk about fat composition. Kitchen fats are what are known as trigycerides. Which is to say their molecules are made up of three long-chain fatty acids attached to a "backbone" of glycerol. Imagine a capital letter "E" and you get the idea.

The trouble with these nice orderly fat molecules is that they don't stay orderly, especially when you expose them to air, water and heat (as in oh, say, a fryer). In such an environment, they steadily, inexorably break down.

The reactions that cause fat molecules to break down are of two basic types: oxidation and hydrolysis. Oxidation, which occurs as the oil is heated and exposed to air, causes the fatty acid chains to break into pieces, yielding all kinds of weird compounds including foul-smelling short-chain fatty acids and ketones (the things that make old oil smell like fish).

Hydrolysis results from the combined effects of heat and water (introduced to the equation by food). It causes the fatty acid chains to break off the glycerol backbone, resulting in free fatty acids and glycerol. If the environment happens to be alkaline (which it becomes as bits of food are cooked and/or burned) a further reaction takes place: saponification.

Now, as some of you may remember from an old post on potash, saponification is the process by which fatty acids, in the presence of an alkaline, are converted into fatty acid salts. In other words: soaps. So now we've got soap molecules mixed in with the frying fat. And what does soap allow oil and water to do? Anyone? Anyone? Yes, you in back with the KFC. Right, it allows them to mix. Now we have a fry environment in which fat and water molecules can slip right past each other. And that, my friends, is what turns the '76 Steeler defensive line into the '08 Lions. Not a pretty picture for a doughnut. Not pretty at all.

I confess I got a little ahead of myself yesterday bringing up the subject of baking powder. For when last we left the History of Chemical leavening narrative, I was blabbering about saleratus (potassium bicarbonate), which was not in fact the direct precursor to baking powder. That distinction belongs to another compound we all know and love: sodium bicarbonate, also known as baking soda.

Interestingly, sodium bicarbonate was also known "saleratus" for a time. The world's first commercial producer of baking soda, a fellow by the name of John Dwight, originally marketed his product as "Dwight's Saleratus" in 1847. His original trademark was a cow, since sour milk (clabber) was required to activate it. In time (by about oh say 1867) that logo would change to an illustration of a muscular arm hoisting an iron hammer, and well, not much more needs to be said about that (though did you know that a fellow by the name of Armand Hammer attempted to buy Church & Dwight, the makers of Arm & Hammer baking soda in the 1980's? Strange but true.).

But where was I? Oh yes, saleratus (potassium bicarbonate) and saleratus (sodium bicarbonate). It's easy to see how those terms came to be conflated. Both are naturally occurring compounds, though truth be told sodium bicarbonate is much much more common geologically. I mentioned previously that settlers heading west occasionally stumbled across small saleratus deposits (making potassium carbonate arguably the world's first drive-though grocery). The same thing happened with sodium bicarbonate deposits, only where natural potassium bicarbonate might occur over an area of a few square acres, natural sodium bicarbonate would cover the landscape for several square miles.

These huge deposits, discovered in Wyoming, were termed "soda lakes" or "soda beds", and were blanketed by powdered soda to such an extent that it appeared to the pioneers that snow drifts had accumulated in summer. Where did/does the soda come from? The answer: from water. More specifically, water that has flowed over (or through) naturally occurring sodium deposits and collected in still pools. When the sodium molecules in the water come into contact with atmospheric carbon dioxide, they react to form sodium carbonate and/or bicarbonate, which then precipitates out as a powder. Neato.

Eventual settlers in the area (especially Mormons) would come from hundreds of miles away to collect soda from these dry lakes, using it not only as a leavening agent, but for lye and soap making. Of course what the early settlers harvested was but a drop in the bucket in terms of the total deposits in Wyoming, which the St. Louis Globe-Democrat described this way in 1898:

[Wyoming has] enough natural soda in their soda lakes to make all the soda biscuits of the world for the next two centuries, and then throw in, for good measure, sufficient [soap] soda and soda lye to cleanse all the "tribes of earth"...and still have plenty left to make window glass for generations to come.

Hey, I said it was descriptive, not politically correct. To this day Wyoming is one of the leading global sources of so-called soda ash, a raw material derived from a mineral called trona. Some fifteen million tons of soda are produced in the US each year, for indeed it is one of the most important commodities on Earth, used not only to make baking soda, but soaps and detergents and especially glass (see previous posts on potash). So pervasive is its use that soda ash production statistics are one of the measures that researchers use it evaluate the performance of the US economy.

And you thought all there was to soda was a little orange box!

A reader sent in this interesting comment over the weekend:

I was just catching up on your blog and found it interesting that baking took off in the New World not just because of trees for fuel but also because of trees for potash . . .

Oh yes indeed. As I've often pointed out in this space, New Worlders have for the last 200-odd years been the world's most prolific home bakers. This is especially true of North Americans, who were blessed with seemingly boundless hardwood forests, which provided not only the chemical leaveners I'm talking about this week, but also the wood fuel that was in such short supply in the Old World.

But of course those woodlands weren't boundless, a fact that was becoming apparent as far back as the early 1800's. In fact by the times Saleratus became comercially available (around 1840) most of it was being made from pearlash derived from burnt marine plants. This development was a great boon to America's forests, not to mention America's bakers, who needed all that wood to make pie.

Of course you didn't have to be a Colonial recycling specialist to make use of leftover fat and ashes. For those dirt poor and/or industrious types, there was always do-it-yourself soap making.

Now me, I'm descended from city folk mostly. But living in Louisville as I now do I've heard more than a few stories from country folk about what it used to smell like when their neighbors made soap. But why would it be so? Potash (or lye, which is even easier to make yourself) isn't particularly smelly stuff. Neither is animal fat if it's freshly butchered. Ah, but then what if it isn't? What if the animal fat you're using has already been used for cooking? Kitchen grease, poured off and stored just like the stuff that's in that tomato can under your sink? Only it's not a tomato can, it's a barrel, and it hasn't been accumulating for a week, it's been there a year, since the last time you made soap.

Oh yes, rancid, cooked-with fat can also be used to make soap. And it frequently was, darned stanky soap. But if that's all you had then it's all you had, and soap making is too involved a process to bother with every time you pour off a little spent pork grease. And so once a year, usually in the fall, it was boiled up in a pot on the back 40. Water was added, the bits of meat and cooked gunk sank, and the fat floated. The whole pot was then cooled, and the "purified" fat skimmed off. The fat was then boiled again with lye, and the chemical magic called saponification occurred, in which molecular fatty acid molecules break apart and fatty acid salts, otherwise known as soap, were formed. If you were well enough off to have spare table salt on hand you tossed some of that in the pot to make cake soap. Otherwise you just used it as it was, a viscous liquid, one that was worlds away from Palmolive, at least odor-wise.

Neat. But Lord the whole thing caused a stink that wafted on the wind for miles. Fortunately, they outlawed it in the suburbs years ago.

For those of you in ecological despair over my story of potash and the way we greedy, ignorant Colonial folk treated the virgin land, I have some comfort to offer you.

Specifically, that while it is true there was some wholesale destruction of woodland to make potash (including forest that wasn't being cleared for farming), clearcutting wasn't the only way potash was made. A far less expensive method was to simply go around and collect ashes from people's homes, where wood was burned for fuel and ashes tended to pile up. Fat did too for that matter, as a waste product from cooking and/or animal butchering. The fellows that came around and collected these leftovers were called chandlers.

Potash was made from the ashes, and the fat was rendered. The two were either combined to make to make soap, or the potash was reserved for sale or export. Which is actually an early form of recycling when you think about it.

It wasn't long after Signori Campanella isolated potassium carbonate that enterprising industrialists of the day took the further refining step of heating potash to burn away its ashy residues. This had the effect of turning the powder a sparkling white, which thence became know as "pearl"-ash (strikingly good marketing considering the time).

The main use for this material, as mentioned, was for glass-making. Yet being such a strong alkaline, it was also great for making soap (alkaline + fat = saponification which...oh hell more on that later). Just how it was discovered (and by whom) that pearlash could be used as a leavening agent is something of a mystery. Though it goes without saying that there was an awful lot of enthusiasm for progress in those early industrial days. People were trying all sorts of things. Evidently, somebody somewhere figured out that if you combined pearlash with an acid in the presence of water the result was effervescence (i.e. the release of gas from a liquid solution, in this case carbon dioxide). Hey! Why not put it in bread?

Why not indeed? And many people did just that here in America, the land where, blessedly, people will try just about any crazy idea. And well, it caught on. Exactly when and where again isn't known, however the first recipe ever to call for pearlash was published in 1796 by one Amelia Simmons (it was for gingerbread). Given that Ms. Simmons likely wouldn't have published a recipe that contained an ingredient that wasn't readily at hand, it's probably safe to assume that pearlash was already in wide use in North America by that time. The age of chemical leavening had begun.

Well, er...no. Or at least probably not. Adding a powder that must have tasted like soot to a cake batter probably wasn't every settler's way of celebrating his birthday. Most of the time the potash was refined a bit more, a step I'll describe in a moment. However before I do it's interesting to point out that there is evidence to show that Native Americans were making use of chemical leavening well before European immigrants ever thought to employ it. Which is to say they were known to add ashes to their corn cakes to lighten their texture. These (still mostly flat) ashen-tasting flapjacks (called nokechick) were a horror to wheat-loving European settlers or the time. Yet they do seem to show that while Native Americans weren't privy to the discoveries of Antonio Campanella, they did by trial and error discover an alkaline's ability to alter the texture of bread.

Joe, when you say chemical leavening started with potash, do you mean the same potash I buy in bags at the hardware store to use in my garden? Yes that's right, the very same stuff. Being such a strong alkaline, it is also extremely useful in neutralizing acid soils.

One could make the argument that the age of chemical leavening began when potassium carbonate was first isolated and definitively identified by chemist Antonio Campanella in 1745. Potassium carbonate is the principal component of potash, which was by far the most important chemical compound in (and one of the chief exports of) colonial North America.

But then what the heck is potash and why was it so important? Potash, as its name implies, derives from wood ashes. It's an alkaline substance that was (and still is) extremely important to the manufacture of glass. Why is that? Well we all know that glass is made by melting down sand (silica) and manipulating it into various shapes. It takes a lot of heat to so that. In fact pure silica has a melting point in excess of 3500 degrees Fahrenheit. A fire that hot, especially for glass makers of old, was very difficult to create, and almost impossible to work around. But what if you could add something to the silica to lower its melting point and make the work environment more tolerable? Substances like these, which when combined with other substances lower their melting points, are known as fluxes in the chemical world. That's what potash was: an additive that lowered the melting point of silica by about 1700 degrees. Much better.

The trouble was that potash was in short supply in the Old World, due to a distinct lack of trees. All that changed of course when the New World, and its seemingly endless forests, was discovered. North America became a veritable potash factory as settlers began to occupy tracts of land and clear-cut the old growth trees, which were especially rich sources of the stuff. Cut down and burned for their ashes, they provided a cash infusion that immigrant farmers desperately needed to buy seed, supplies, and building materials for their homes.

But then how is potash made? Basically, by putting wood ashes into a vessel with a hole at the bottom and soaking them with water. With time the water leeches the impure potassium carbonate out of the ashes, and it drips out the bottom of the vessel. Anyone know what this liquid is called? Anyone? Anyone? Yes you at the back with the chemical burns. Yes that's right: lye. Lye is a caustic alkaline liquid that had a variety of uses back in the day. Dried, however, it yielded a black powder: potash.

It took over an acre of big, old-growth trees to produce a single ton of potash, but then the early colonists weren't really thinking about that. From their vantage point the forests of North America went on forever. And oh boy were the glass makers of the Old World willing to pay for the stuff. Potash was, as I mentioned, one of the central pillars of the early American economy. No wonder then that the very first U.S. patent ever issued went to a gentleman by the name of Samuel Hopkins of Philadelphia for an improved method of "making pot ash and pearl ashes" in 1790. Of course potash was just as important to Canada, which remains the world's leading producer of potash to this day.

So, the Woodford pudding is standing on its own. Now all I have to do is teach it to walk (I have a few ideas on that).

So what did I do differently? The big change, as mentioned, was whole eggs instead of yolks. I also swapped a 1/2 cup of whole buttermilk for the 1/2 cup of sour cream, which is probably a little more authentic anyway, since it's likely that back in the day a cake like this was leavened with potash and clabber (more on that in the next couple of weeks). The nice thing about having real liquid in the recipe was that it then freed me up to employ the Creaming Method (beat butter & sugar, add eggs one at a time, then alternate dry ingredients and liquids), which helped to develop the structure even further. I'm close now, so close I can almost...

The apple fritter may be an Old World classic, but the pumpkin-corn fritter, that's a strictly New World concoction. Could the early settlers have made such a thing? Well, looking over the ingredients list, there's almost nothing here they wouldn't have had access to. Maize, that's a for sure. Pumpkin, no doubt there either, the Indians had been cultivating them for nearly 5,000 years by then. Maple syrup was a staple of the colonies, at least in the North, and among all who out of conscience elected not to purchase commodities produced by slave labor. For the rest, brown sugar was readily at hand. And while it was a rather expensive rarity (at least early on) wheat flour could be had in New England if you knew where to look for it. As for the spices, they would have been imported.

That leaves leavening. Would the settlers have had baking soda? It's possible, at least if we're talking post-1750 or thereabouts. But here again we're talking about an imported substance. A more common chemical leavener in those days would have been potash or potassium carbonate, basically a kiln-dried reduction of lye, which itself is a wood extract, made by soaking charcoal or ashes in water. Potash, like soda, is an alkaline, and was a big-time export in those days (Europe had precious little left in the way of trees, you see, but needed potash for glass making). But while potash may have been abundant in those days, it certainly wasn't something people ate if they could possibly avoid it. Any anyway, the Dutch were leavening their olykoeks (or proto-doughnuts) with yeast around that time. My guess is that anyone who might have thought to mix up another fried treat like this (an early Emeril, let's say, only in knee-socks) would have used the same basic leavening technique.

One of my favorite memories from the block where I grew up concerns a Swedish couple that lived a few houses down. The woman of the house, a classic round-faced Nordic matron by the name of Lily, was the most accomplished baker in town. My sister and I would sneak in her back door on summer afternoons to snap up cookies and cardamom rolls, and wonder at the sight of her huge upper arms slapping against her armpits as she beat egg whites into angel food cake (she did it all without a mixer, just an egg board and a flat whisk).

With a ringer like Lily living on the block, the bar was set pretty high come Christmas Eve, when everyone in the neighborhood exchanged holiday foods. By and large, all the moms remained competitive with the exception of the lady across the street, who, inspired by newly-emerging "healthy" baking trends, subtracted 50% of the sugar from her cookie recipe, and substituted wheat germ (you should see how her children turned out as a result of this sort of baking...a tragedy).

Christmas day was always the same comic ritual. Because of the gradation of the adjoining properties, my sister and I could look right down into Lily's back yard. Come 9:00 or so her husband Inge would emerge and begin gesturing broadly, as though he were waving a Christmas greeting to all the houses on the block. What he was really doing was scattering the crumbled wheat germ cookies to the four winds (and a flock of excited birds).

I bring this up because this is almost exactly how early Americans received the gift of corn cakes from the Indians. The Colonists were of course descendants of a wheat-eating culture, accustomed to soft, fluffy white wheat breads. One can only imagine how they greeted what the natives had on offer: flat, dense, grainy, largely unleavened (and unseasoned) cakes of pounded corn that tasted vaguely of ashes. Oh, er, thank you! The wife and I just love these things! I gobble'em down by the box! Just can't get enough. Thank you so, so much.

Of course when the flour ship didn't come in, the colonists didn't do much better with the stuff. Writings of the time reflect the sense despair they felt trying to turn "Indian pone" as it was often called, into palatable bakery. Being completely devoid of gluten, pure corn meal resists leavening of virtually any kind, though the Indians did manage to lighten their cakes to some degree by adding home-made potash (hence the burnt wood aftertaste). It would take much trial and error (and an eventual blending of wheat flour and corn meal) before the colonists arrived at something that approximated the taste of home. Even then, for many of the first Americans, corn meal-based cakes remained a food of last resort.

For you gardeners out there, the potash I was just talking about is indeed the same potash that you use in the garden. I forgot to mention that one of potash's other critical uses is as a fertilizer. Being so strongly alkaline, it's ideal for neutralizing acid soils.

Jeez, I am turning into Martha Stewart.