Baking Powder

choi

Bart Elmore, The Indispensable Ingredient; When synthetic baking powder was invented in the mid-19th century, it was hailed by many as a time-saving miracle products. Wall Street Journal, Aug 11, 2017
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bak ... gredient-1502403821
(book review on Linda Civitello, Baking Powder Wars; The cutthroat food fight that revolutionized cooking. University of Illinois Press, 2017)

Quote:

(a) "Ms Civitello * * * vividly shows the arduous and time-consuming work involved in bread making from the colonial period to the decade before the Civil War. Up to 1850s, she explains, more than 90% of all bread in America was homemade, which was quite a feat, considering the limited number of leavening agents at their disposal. One preferred substance was emptins, a byproduct of in-home beer brewing, but this was problematic because it worked slowly and had to be used in large quantities. Plus there was the issue of kneading. Whether using emptins or other leaveners, even simple bread recipes called for half an hour or more of kneading to diffuse the yeast through the dough. This was hard work.

"It is no wonder, then, that many women welcomed the arrival of synthetic baking powder, a miracle product without much preparation. An instrumental figure in this transformation in American food ways was Eben Horsford, Harvard's Rumford Chair for the Application of Science to the Useful Arts, who in 1856 patented a method for making monocalcium phosphate from ground animal bones. Mixed with baking soda, this substance was sold in paper packets in pharmacies. * * * in the coming years new competitors fought for supremacy in an expanding market that included more than 500 companies by 1900.

(b) Among the major [corporate] combatants was the Royal Baking Powder Co, incorporated in New York City  in 1873, which used cream of tartar -- an 'acid by-product of wine making' -- to create a leavening agent * * * Royal faced off against the manufacturers of Calumet baking powder in Illinois and The Indiana-based Clabber brand, both of which used sodium aluminum sulfate, a synthetic chemical, to make their baking powder.

"In the battle * * * Royal also worked the hall of state assemblies, trying to persuade local politicians across the country to ban baking powders containing sodium aluminum sulfate on the grounds that they were adulterated with a toxic chemical. Ultimately, the Agriculture Department determined in 1914 that sodium aluminum sulfate in baking powder didn't represent a health threat, and by the mid-20th century aluminum-based baking powders gained supremacy, largely because they were cheaper to produce tha Royal's wine-based varieties.

My comment:
(a) There is no need to read the rest.
(b) emptins (n; etymology)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/emptins
(c) To make long story short, baking powder is basically sodium bicarbonate (also known as baking soda) or carbonate, together with one or more weak acids that supply hydrogen ions: monocalcium phosphate, sodium aluminum sulfate, sodium acid pyrophosphate, and cream of tartar chemically (all of which contain hydrogen ions to release).



(d) chemical structure:
(i) monocalcium phosphate  Ca(H2PO4)2
(ii) sodium acid pyrophosphate / disodium pyrophosphate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disodium_pyrophosphate
(iii) The "cream of tartar" is potassium bitartrate/ potassium hydrogen tartrate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium_bitartrate
, with which Louis Pasteur discovered chirality.