Beat the yolks of 3 eggs until very light; add 1 pint of milk. Sift 1 pint of flour with 2 teaspoonfuls of baking-powder; add ½ teaspoonful of salt and the whites of the eggs beaten to a stiff froth. Flavor with rose-water. Mix well together and pour into hot well-buttered cake-tins. Bake in a quick oven until a light brown. Serve hot with French coffee.
A popover batter of the plainer American sort, leavened with both eggs and baking powder. The wording compresses the mixing order, so read the whole thing before you start.
- Quick ovenA "quick oven" is generally taken as somewhere around 400–450°F. Popovers depend on a hard initial blast of heat to turn the milk and egg into steam; a moderate oven gives you flat, damp cups.
- Pints as dry measureA pint of flour here means two cups by volume, roughly 8–9 oz sifted, not a pint by weight. The pint of milk is the standard two cups. The resulting batter is thin, closer to cream than to muffin batter.
- Cake-tinsMost likely cast-iron gem pans or deep muffin cups rather than a layer-cake pan. Heavy metal preheated in the oven until the butter sizzles is the point; the batter should hiss as it goes in. Fill each cup about two-thirds.
- The mixing orderAs written the flour, salt and beaten whites all arrive together, which is unclear. Beat the yolks with the milk, whisk in the sifted flour, baking powder and salt until smooth, then fold the whites in last so the air survives.
- Baking powderClassic popovers use none at all, relying entirely on steam. The two teaspoonfuls here are belt-and-braces and will give a slightly more cakey, less hollow interior. Modern double-acting powder is generally reckoned stronger than the single-acting powders of the period; a teaspoon and a half is plenty.
- Rose-waterStill sold, but the food-grade kind varies enormously in strength. The recipe gives no quantity: start with half a teaspoon and taste the batter, since period rose-water was probably weaker than a concentrated modern extract.
- Don't open the ovenThe original gives no time. Reckon on 20 minutes at high heat, then 10–15 more with the heat dropped to 350°F to dry the walls. Opening the door early collapses them.
- Yield and servingThis makes over four cups of batter, so more than a dozen standard muffin cups' worth; judge by the pan. They must go to the table straight from the oven; the "French coffee" called for at the end probably means strong coffee served with hot milk, café au lait style.
The popover is an American descendant of the English batter pudding — the same eggs, milk and flour that go under a joint of beef to catch the drippings, baked instead in individual buttered cups. The name is generally traced to the way the batter climbs and "pops over" the rim of the tin, and it appears in American cookbooks through the second half of the nineteenth century, sometimes as "puffs" depending on the pan. What makes this version "French" in the eyes of its compiler is the rose-water and the coffee: floral distillates were a fixture of French confectionery, and café au lait was shorthand for a continental breakfast. Books of this kind assigned a nationality to a dish on the strength of one such detail, which tells you more about how Americans imagined foreign tables than about anything eaten in France.