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Breakfast Puffs
Take two eggs well beaten, and stir into a pint of milk, a little salt, a piece of butter, and a pint and a half of flour. Beat the eggs, and stir the milk. Add the salt, melt the butter, and stir in. Then pour all into the flour, so as not to have it lumpy. Stir up thoroughly, and butter the cups into which the batter is poured, filling them two-thirds full. Eat with sauce.
This is a popover batter under an older name: no leavening but steam, so the oven heat and the vessel matter more than anything in the ingredient list.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all; the cook is left to judge it. Batters of this kind are usually baked with a fierce start, around 425-450F for the first 15-20 minutes to drive the steam up, then dropped to 350F for another 15 or so to set the shell. Opening the door early risks collapsing them.
- "A piece of butter"Genuinely vague. For a pint of milk, 1 to 2 tablespoons melted is the usual reading; more than that weighs the batter down and the puffs stay squat.
- MeasuresA pint is 2 cups of milk. A pint and a half of flour means volume, not weight - roughly 3 cups scooped, about 12-13 oz. Note that this is a stiffer batter than a modern popover, which is usually made with roughly equal volumes of flour and milk.
- The cupsCast-iron gem or popover pans and heavy earthenware cups were both in use in this period. Grease them well. Modern practice is to preheat them empty and pour into hot cups for a better rise, though the recipe as written simply has you butter the cups and fill them.
- MixingPour the liquid into the flour rather than the reverse, as directed, and beat until genuinely smooth. Lumps here are not harmless - they become dense pockets. A brief rest of 15-30 minutes lets the flour hydrate and improves the lift.
- Two-thirds fullFollow this exactly. Filled to the rim, the batter climbs over and welds itself to the pan.
- "Eat with sauce"Most likely a sweet pudding sauce - a hard sauce of butter and sugar, or a thin lemon or vanilla sauce - rather than gravy, though the recipe does not specify.
- YieldAbout 10 to 12 standard popovers. They deflate within minutes of leaving the oven, so bake them to be eaten immediately.
Breakfast puffs, popovers, and the older "Yorkshire pudding" batter are all the same idea: a thin egg-and-milk batter that rises on steam alone, without yeast, soda, or baking powder. Nineteenth-century American cookbooks list them under many names - puffs, popovers, laplanders, gems - often distinguished only by the pan used. Their popularity in household books of this era owes something to the spread of cheap cast-iron gem and popover pans, whose deep, heat-retaining cups made a reliable rise possible in ordinary home ovens. The closing instruction to eat them with sauce places these firmly on the sweet side of the breakfast table, closer to a pudding than to a roll.