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Lucy's Pop-Overs
Two tea-cups sweet milk, two tea-cups sifted flour, heaped a little, butter size of a walnut, two eggs, and one table-spoon sugar, a little salt; bake in hot gem-pans, filled half full, for twenty minutes, and serve immediately. - Mrs. W. A. James, Marshall, Mich. POCKET-BOoks.
Warm one quart new milk, add one cup butter or lard, four tablespoons sugar, and two well-beaten eggs; stir in flour enough to make a moderately stiff sponge, add a small cup of yeast, and set in a warm place to rise, which will take three or four hours; then mix in flour enough to make a soft dough and let rise again. When well risen, dissolve a lump of soda size of a bean in a spoon of milk, work it into the dough and roll into sheets one-half inch in thickness; spread with thin layer of butter, cut into squares, and fold over, pocket-book shape; put on tins or in pans to rise for a little while, when they will be fit for the oven. In summer the sponge can be made up in the morning, and rise in time to make for tea. In cool weather it is best to set it over night. - Mrs. J. H. Shearer.
Two recipes share this page: a popover batter and a yeast-raised folded roll. Both assume a cast-iron gem pan and a wood-fired oven, and both leave the oven temperature to your judgment.
- Tea-cupsA nineteenth-century tea-cup is usually reckoned smaller than a modern measuring cup, often put at about three-quarters of one, though the usage was not standardised. The important thing in popovers is that milk and flour are equal by volume, so two tea-cups of each with two eggs gives the right thin, cream-like batter.
- Gem pansA gem pan is the heavy cast-iron muffin tin of the period. Popovers need it screaming hot and well greased before the batter goes in — that initial blast of heat is what drives the steam that lifts them.
- "Hot" ovenThe book gives no temperatures; a wood-fired oven called "hot" would be at the upper end of its range, and modern popover recipes generally sit somewhere around 425-450F. Twenty minutes at that heat sets the shell; some modern methods then drop the heat for a further ten to fifteen minutes so the interiors dry out and the popovers do not collapse.
- Do not open the doorPopovers rise on steam, and a draft of cool air part-way through can deflate them. Best to leave them alone until the shells are firm and deep brown.
- Fill half fullTake this literally. Overfilled cups spread and knit together instead of climbing, and the centres stay wet.
- Yield and servingThe batter will fill a standard muffin tin with room to spare, rather fewer cups if you use a deep popover pan; count on around a dozen and adjust. "Serve immediately" is not a flourish -- they soften within minutes.
- The cup of yeast in Pocket-BooksThat is homemade liquid yeast, a thin ferment kept in a jug, not modern dried yeast. For a quart of milk, about two teaspoons of instant yeast is the working equivalent, with the rising times shortened accordingly.
- The sodaA bean-sized lump of soda amounts to a pinch, a quarter teaspoon at most. It is there to neutralise the sourness of a long-risen homemade yeast sponge; with commercial yeast and a controlled rise there is little for it to correct.
- Pocket-book shapeRolled half an inch thick, buttered, cut in squares and folded — the same principle as a Parker House roll, where the butter layer keeps the fold from sealing and gives a hinge that opens at the table.
Buckeye Cookery is built from contributed recipes, each signed with a name and a town, and this page is typical: a Michigan cook's popovers followed by another woman's yeast rolls, set down one after the other as they arrived. (The book's early editions came out of Marysville, Ohio, in the mid-1870s; the widely circulated 1877 Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping was issued from Minneapolis.) Popovers are generally taken to be the American descendant of English batter puddings -- the same eggs, milk and flour that go under a roast as Yorkshire pudding, baked instead in individual iron cups so each one climbs into a hollow shell. The name is usually traced to that climb, the batter popping over the rim of the pan. "Gem pans" were a fixture of the period's stove furniture, sold in sets of heavy cast-iron cups.