Puff Pudding
One pint flour, one pint milk, three well beaten eggs, bake in hot gem pans; twenty minutes will bake them, if the oven is hot as it should be. Serve with a rich sauce.
This is a popover batter under an older name, and it succeeds or fails on the heat of the pan. Everything else is forgiving.
- Get the pans hot first"Gem pans" are heavy cast-iron muffin or popover pans. Grease them and heat them in the oven until the fat shimmers, then pour in the batter; a cold pan gives dense, soggy cups rather than hollow ones.
- "A hot oven"An oven "hot as it should be" -- for a batter like this, roughly 425-450F. The steam has to expand fast enough to inflate the shell before the crust sets. Do not open the door during the first 15 minutes.
- Pint measuresBoth flour and milk are measured by volume: a pint of flour is 2 cups, roughly 8-9 oz depending on how it is scooped, and a pint of milk is 2 cups. The equal-volume ratio plus three eggs produces a batter about as thin as heavy cream.
- Add saltThe original gives none. Half a teaspoon makes the difference between a bland shell and one worth eating.
- Beat well, then rest"Three well beaten eggs" is doing real work here, since there is no chemical leavening at all. Whisk the batter until completely smooth and let it stand 20-30 minutes so the flour hydrates.
- YieldAbout 10 to 12 standard muffin-sized puddings, or rather fewer in deep popover cups. Serve them the moment they come out; they collapse as they cool.
- "A rich sauce"For a sweet pudding of this kind that means a pudding sauce: hard sauce (creamed butter and powdered sugar), a lemon or vanilla cornstarch sauce, or plain cream and sugar. Split the puddings and pour it in.
Batter puddings of flour, milk and eggs run through English and American cookery for centuries, baked in a dish under roasting meat as Yorkshire pudding or, sweetened and sauced, sent up as dessert. What distinguishes this version is the vessel: gem pans, the cast-iron trays of the late nineteenth century, gave every diner an individual crisp-shelled pudding instead of a slab cut from a dish. The name "puff pudding" describes the result rather than any ingredient -- there is no leavening in it, only steam and egg -- and much the same formula appears elsewhere in the period as popovers, breakfast puffs or Laplanders, the label depending largely on which meal it was headed for.