The Rise of Baking Powder Business
The Rise of Baking Powder Business
The Northeast, 1856–1876
In antebellum America, baking powder experimentation moved out of women’s kitchens and into men’s laboratories as chemistry became a serious discipline. In 1856, Eben Horsford, a chemistry professor at Harvard, patented the first true baking powder, which he called yeast powder. It coincided with the discovery that yeast was a live fungus, which disgusted Americans concerned about food adulteration, and who flocked to baking powder bread made without fermentation. In 1868, in New York City, salesman William Ziegler, together with pharmacists the Hoagland brothers, formed the Royal Baking Powder Company, which used cream of tartar, a formula different from Horsford’s.
Keywords: baking powder, yeast powder, fermentation, adulteration, Horsford, Rumford, Harvard, chemistry, Royal, Ziegler
Illinois Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
