Popovers
1 cup flour. 7/8 cup milk. 1/4 teaspoon salt. 1 teaspoon melted Cottolene. 2 eggs beaten very light.
Supplementary Recipes PROCESS: Sift flour and salt together, add milk gradually, beating continuously. Add melted Cottolene and beaten eggs. Beat batter with a Dover egg beater three or four minutes until it is perfectly smooth, creamy and full of bubbles. Pour into hissing-hot, wellgreased gem cups and bake in a hot oven thirty to thirty-five minutes. They may also be baked in earthen custard cups. When baked in the latter vessel they will have a glazed appearance.
A lean, straightforward popover batter that depends less on ingredients than on heat. Everything hinges on the pans being genuinely blistering when the batter hits them.
- CottoleneA branded cottonseed-oil shortening heavily advertised in the 1890s and long discontinued. One teaspoon of melted butter or a neutral oil does the same work; at this quantity it is there for tenderness, not flavour.
- 7/8 cup milkThree-quarters cup plus two tablespoons. The batter should pour like heavy cream — thinner than pancake batter.
- Gem cupsA gem pan is the cast-iron ancestor of the muffin tin. Cast iron or a dedicated popover pan gives the best rise because it holds heat; thin nonstick tins climb less.
- "Hissing-hot"This is the instruction that matters. Grease the cups, heat them in the oven until the fat shimmers and the pan is too hot to touch, then pour the batter in and return it immediately. Cold pans give dense, squat popovers.
- A hot ovenRoughly 425-450F by modern equivalents; the recipe itself gives no figure. Some modern bakers drop the heat for the last ten minutes to dry the interior without over-browning the shell, though the original describes a single unbroken bake.
- Dover egg beaterA hand-crank rotary beater. A whisk or a blender does the job; the stated three or four minutes works air into the batter and develops some gluten, so beat until the surface is genuinely foamy, as the recipe asks.
- Do not open the doorPopovers set their structure on steam. Opening the oven early can make them collapse, so leave the door shut until the bake is nearly done.
- Custard cupsEarthenware heats more gently than metal, which is the likely reason for the 'glazed appearance' the author mentions. Set them on a baking sheet for easy handling.
- YieldAbout eight to ten popovers in standard muffin cups, or six in a popover pan. Serve them the moment they come out; they deflate within minutes.
Popovers are the American descendant of the English batter pudding baked in beef drippings — the same family as Yorkshire pudding — and the name, generally traced to the mid-nineteenth century, is often said to describe what the batter does as it climbs over the rim of the cup. The recipe's real curiosity is the Cottolene: 52 Sunday Dinners was published by the N. K. Fairbank Company, which manufactured Cottolene, a cottonseed-oil shortening promoted through the 1890s and 1900s as a cleaner, more modern alternative to lard. Books like this one were advertising in cookbook form, and the branded fat turns up in nearly every recipe, sometimes, as here, in quantities as small as a teaspoon.