2 Chapter 2-How Chemical Leaveners came to be
Learning Objective #3
A Brief History of Chemical Leaveners.
As early as the 1790’s, home bakers were using Pearlash (potash) to leaven their cakes. A mixture of lye and wood ashes, pearlash consisted mainly of potassium carbonate which produced carbon dioxide very quickly, however, the mixture was quite caustic and smelled terrible. Around 1846, baking soda was discovered and home bakers realized that by mixing it with an acid, carbon dioxide was produced! Sour milk was often used, which created the leavening gasses, though somewhat inconsistently since sour milk had a very unpredictable acidity level.
In the late 1840s, chemist Alfred Bird created the first baking powder by combining baking soda and an acid (cream of tartar). Cream of tartar was quite expensive, so this creation was well out of reach for most Americans. This concoction was then refined in the 1850’s by Eben Norton Horsford, a young chemist from Harvard University. He found a way to obtain monocalcium phosphate by mining instead of using the expensive cream of tartar, which improved the price point of this product dramatically. In the late 1880’s this chemist created the Rumford brand of baking powder, one that is still sold to this day. It became a household brand name due to the ingredients’ reliability and accessible price.