Theda Bara
Recipe with courtesy of Mr. Fred Keiner.
POPOVERS
1 cup flour 1/4 teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon melted butter 1 cup milk 2 eggs Mix salt and flour, add milk gradually and beat until a smooth batter is formed. Add eggs (previously beaten) and butter. Fill well-greased hot iron gem pans two-thirds full and bake in a moderate oven. When popovers are well raised and puffed, increase the heat to brown them.
They should bake forty-five minutes to one hour in order to be well done.
Sincerely, "Trifles light as air."
A plain popover formula — one cup flour, one cup milk, two eggs — that depends entirely on steam and a screaming hot pan. The oven handling is the whole recipe.
- The hinge: heat the pan empty first"Well-greased hot iron gem pans" is not a flourish. Grease the tin, set it in the oven while it preheats, and pour the batter into pans hot enough to sizzle; a cold tin gives you dense muffins instead of a hollow shell.
- Gem pansCast-iron gem pans were shallow muffin tins. A modern popover pan with deep straight wells gives the tallest result, but a heavy 6-cup muffin tin works. Fill two-thirds full as directed and expect 6 to 8 popovers from this batter.
- Oven numbersA "moderate oven" in this period is usually glossed as 350-375F. The recipe gives no figure for "increase the heat to brown them"; a hot finish, somewhere above 400F, is the sense of it. Many cooks now reverse the order -- a hot start for the first 15 minutes, then down to moderate -- which builds the steam faster; either sequence works so long as the pan started hot.
- Forty-five minutes to an hourThat is long by current practice, where 35 to 40 minutes is standard. The instruction is not wrong, though: an underbaked popover collapses as it cools. Bake until the walls are firm and deeply browned rather than to the clock.
- Do not open the doorUnstated here, but essential. Resist checking until the popovers are fully risen and set, or the steam escapes and they sink.
- Eggs "previously beaten"Beating the eggs separately before adding them keeps the batter smooth without overworking the flour. The batter should have the consistency of thin cream; a 15-minute rest at room temperature makes for a better rise.
- A stray lineThe fragment "two parts of white broth and one part of" belongs to a neighbouring recipe and has nothing to do with the popovers. Ignore it.
- ServingBest straight from the oven with butter. Pierce each one with a knife tip on removal to let the steam out if you cannot serve them immediately.
Popovers are the American descendant of English batter puddings — the same flour, milk and egg batter that becomes Yorkshire pudding under a joint of beef, but baked in individual buttered cups so each one puffs into a hollow shell. The name is generally taken to be American, and is often said to describe the behaviour: the batter pops over the rim of the tin. They appear in household cookery books of the later nineteenth century as a cheap, quick breakfast bread requiring no yeast and no baking powder. Their presence here is the joke the editor's note points at: a cookbook trading on the glamour of screen personalities collected, from the most theatrically exotic star of the moment, a recipe that any Cincinnati household could have supplied.