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Tip Tops
Separate three eggs; beat yolks slightly, then add gradually two cups of cold water and beat briskly until light and foamy. Stir very carefully into two cups well sifted flour, making a smooth batter; strain through a fine sieve, add one-half teaspoon salt and one tablespoon melted butter, mix well. Stir in one heaping teaspoon baking powder and whites of the eggs beaten to a stiff froth. Bake in hot gem pans.
— Mrs. Edgar Washburn
This is a popover batter in all but name — thin, egg-heavy, and reliant on steam for its rise. The original gives no oven temperature because the cook was expected to know that gem pans go into a hot oven.
- Oven heatThe recipe calls for hot gem pans and gives no oven temperature at all; batters of this type are generally started in a high oven. Preheat the pans in the oven until they are genuinely hot, grease them, and fill them about two-thirds full so the batter sets against hot metal on contact.
- Gem pansHeavy cast-iron muffin pans, often with deep oval or round cups. A modern popover pan or a cast-iron muffin pan is the closest match; thin nonstick tins conduct too little heat to force the rise.
- The hinge: do not open the ovenThese climb on steam. Give them about 20 minutes at high heat before you look, then another 10–15 minutes to dry the walls. Opening early collapses them into custardy lumps.
- Straining the batterNot fussiness — a thin flour-and-water batter lumps easily, and the sieve catches what stirring missed. A whisk or a brief blitz in a blender does the same job.
- Baking powder and beaten whitesBoth are belt-and-braces additions typical of turn-of-the-century home baking; true popovers use neither. Fold the whites in with a light hand and get the pans into the oven at once, before the leavening spends itself.
- ButterOne tablespoon of melted butter in this quantity of batter is for flavor and release, not richness. It goes into the strained batter, so let it cool a little rather than adding it scalding.
- Yield and servingRoughly a dozen standard muffin-sized gems, or eight to nine deep popovers. Serve immediately, split and steaming, with butter; they deflate within minutes of leaving the oven.
"Tip tops" appears to be one of the many local names for the steam-raised batter cake that American cookbooks of the period more usually call popovers — a name commonly explained, though not documented, by the way the batter pops over the rim of the cup. The form descends from English batter puddings cooked under roasting meat, of which Yorkshire pudding is the surviving example; American cooks moved the batter into cast-iron gem pans, which were widely sold in the second half of the nineteenth century and gave their name to a whole family of quick breads. This version hedges with baking powder and stiffly beaten whites, the sort of insurance individual contributors often built into community-cookbook recipes — this one signed, as such contributions frequently were, with a married name.