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Breakfast Puffs
One pint of flour, one pint of sweet milk, two tablespoons of sweet cream, one-half teaspoon of salt, two eggs. Beat the eggs well in the mixing bowl, then add gradually the flour and milk. Beat and stir until the batter is smooth; add cream and salt. If the batter seems too thick, add a little more milk-it should be like thin pancake batter. Heat the gem pans very hot after greasing them well, and bake in a hot oven about twenty minutes.
This is a popover batter under an older name, and it behaves like one: the steam does all the work, so the pan must be screaming hot and the oven door must stay shut.
- The hinge: heat the pans emptyGrease the gem pans, then heat them in the oven until the fat shimmers before the batter goes in. Batter poured into a cold pan will rise sluggishly and set into a dense, eggy muffin instead of a hollow shell.
- A pint is two cupsTwo cups flour (about 8 1/2 oz) and two cups milk. The batter should pour like heavy cream; if it ribbons or mounds, thin it as the recipe says.
- "Hot oven"425-450F. Some cooks start at 450F for the first 15 minutes and drop to 350F to finish, which sets the walls without scorching them.
- Twenty minutes is optimisticTwenty minutes may be short -- modern popover recipes generally call for 30-40 minutes total, and puffs pulled too early can sink on the rack. Small gem-pan cups bake faster than a deep popover pan, so judge by colour: bake until deep brown and firm to a tap.
- Do not open the doorNothing in the batter but eggs and steam holds the structure up. A draft before the walls have set drops them flat.
- Sweet milk, sweet creamBoth simply mean fresh and unsoured, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabbered milk a nineteenth-century kitchen also kept. Use whole milk and heavy cream.
- Gem pansHeavy cast-iron muffin pans, made in a range of cup shapes and depths. A modern popover pan or a cast-iron muffin tin works; fill each cup no more than two-thirds.
- YieldAbout a dozen standard muffin-size puffs, or eight to nine in a deep popover pan. Serve immediately, split, with butter.
Breakfast puffs, popovers, and Yorkshire pudding are all the same idea worked at different scales: a thin egg-and-milk batter, violent heat, and steam pushing the shell open from the inside. American cookbooks of the later nineteenth century print the batter under a shifting set of names depending on what it was baked in, including the gem pan named here. Because the formula needs no leavening, no sugar, and nothing beyond flour, milk, eggs and a little cream, it turns up constantly in community collections like this one as a quick hot bread for breakfast, the sort of thing a cook could stir up while the oven was already hot from something else.