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Pop Overs
Beat up 3 eggs until light; add 1 cup milk and 1 teaspoon melted Crisco. Pour this gradually into 1 cup flour and 1/2 teaspoon salt, beating all the time until smooth. Crisco iron gem pans, put them in the oven, and when hot, take them out and fill them half of this batter. Put them back in the oven and bake for 45 minutes. They should be at least 4 times their original bulk. If they fall, they are not thoroughly done. The oven should be hot. Pilau, a la Turque Put 1 1/2 cups of stock, with 1 cup stewed and strained tomato, over fire. When boiling add 1 cup well-washed or blanched rice and 1/2 teaspoon salt; stir lightly with fork, occasionally, until liquor is absorbed. Then add 1/2 cup Crisco, season with salt and pepper, and cook over hot water until tender; remove cover, and stir with fork before serving.
Two recipes have run together on this page: a popover batter and a rice pilau. Both come from a Crisco cookbook, and both assume a solid-fuel range where an oven could be roaring hot at the start of baking.
- The hinge: heat the pan firstThe batter must hit fat-slicked metal that is already hot enough to sizzle. That initial burst of steam is what lifts a popover; pouring into a cold pan gives you dense pancakes in cups.
- "The oven should be hot"The book gives no number. Take it as a high heat at the start; note that a full blast held for the whole 45 minutes risks over-browning the shells before the interiors set, so many modern versions drop the heat partway.
- Iron gem pansThese are heavy cast-iron muffin pans, the ancestor of the deep-welled popover tin. A cast-iron muffin pan or a modern popover pan both work; thin nonstick tins hold too little heat.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote it, hence the shortening in places butter would normally go. Any neutral solid fat or oil greases the pans; melted butter in the batter tastes better.
- Do not open the doorThe instruction that they should reach four times their bulk and that fallen popovers are underdone is sound. The structure sets late, so keep the oven shut for most of the baking time.
- YieldAbout 8 to 10 popovers from the cup of flour, depending on well size. Serve them straight from the oven; they deflate within minutes.
- On the pilau: half a cup of fatThat is very rich by current taste for one cup of rice. Two to three tablespoons is closer to modern practice, and the rice will still be glossy.
- "Cook over hot water"A double boiler, not direct heat. It is a gentle finish that lets the grains swell without catching, and it takes 20 to 30 minutes, so check for tenderness rather than watching the clock.
- Liquid for the pilauTwo and a half cups of liquid to one cup of rice is generous. All of it goes in before the rice, which is then finished over hot water once the liquor is absorbed.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to sell Crisco, which reached the market in 1911 — which explains why shortening appears in a popover batter and in a Turkish rice dish alike. The popover itself is generally traced to English batter puddings, the same family as Yorkshire pudding, cooked in individual wells rather than a single dripping pan. The pilau on the same page reflects a long-standing Anglo-American habit of labeling any seasoned rice dish pilau, pilaf or pilaw after the Persian and Turkish original.