It wasn’t long after potassium carbonate was finally isolated as the key ingredient in potash (Antonio Campanella, 1745) that enterprising chemists got interested in refining it, taking the extra 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 […]
READ ONThat’s a very interesting question, reader Charles. I don’t know the definitive answer to that, save for the fact that Native Americans were doing it well before anyone else. They were the ones who noticed that a little wood ash added to a grain cake batter created bubbles that lightened the finished product. My guess is that colonists to the New World took note of these practices and refined them to create what we now know as chemical leavening agents. These sorts of products would have been especially useful on the American frontier where, unlike back home in Europe, there were no village or estate bakeries where people could easily acquire bread. If Americans wanted bread they had to make their own — and chemical leavening was the quickest and easiest way to do that.
READ ONIf you or someone you know is into old (actually very old) recipes, odds are you’ve seen this listed as an ingredient here and there. Pearlash is refined potassium carbonate, an alkaline salt found in wood ashes that also goes by the name potash. Potash was used for a lot of things back in the 1700s and 1800s, especially glassmaking. These days we mostly know it as a fertilizer, but once upon a time it was used to leaven things like corn cakes since it makes bubbles when it gets wet. Given that potash was made from wood ash, its effect on the flavor of corn cakes was as you might expect, but hey, at least the texture was lighter.
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His name is William Henry Perkin. I bring him up because reader Antuanete wants to know what precisely coal tar dyes are and how they’re made. I confess that the specific chemistry of synthetic dyes is mostly beyond me. What I do know is that the world’s first synthetic dye was a kitchen accident. It happened in 1856 when Perkin, then an apprentice to the legendary German chemist A.W. Hoffman, attempted to create synthetic quinine (an expensive tree bark extract that was a critical malaria medicine) over his Easter vacation. He combined aniline, a by-product of the coke-making process, with potash and sulfuric acid. The goo he made was not even a little bit like quinine, but when Perkin combined it with alcohol, a sort of purple was the result.
READ ONWant to hear something really confusing? Both potassium bicarbonate and sodium bicarbonate were marketed under the name “saleratus” in the 1840’s. Why I have no idea, other than basic principles of branding and competitive differentiation were not well understood at the time. How else to explain why John Dwight, a baker from New York City, went to market selling his bicarbonate of soda as “Dwight’s Saleratus” in 1847?
READ ONFor those of you in ecological despair over my story of potash and the way greedy, ignorant Colonial folk treated the virgin land, I have some comfort to offer. Specifically, that while it is true there was some wholesale destruction of woodland in the interest of making potash (some of that forest, in truth, wasn’t […]
READ ONTo 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 […]
READ ONA 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 […]
READ ONOf 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 […]
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