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Popovers (No. 1)
2 eggs (yolks) 1 tablespoon sugar 1 tablespoon melted butter 1 cup milk 1 cup Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons (heaping) baking powder.
Beat the whites of the 2 eggs perfectly stiff and add last of all. Bake in gem tins, filling each tin half full. Bake 10 minutes.
A short batter recipe with two quirks: the original gives no oven temperature, and the last line belongs to another recipe entirely. Both need sorting out before you start.
- The stray lineThe trailing "2 eggs, ½ cup butter, 1½ cups sugar" is not part of this recipe — it is the opening of the next entry, run together in the original setting. Ignore it.
- Not a true popoverDespite the name, this is leavened with baking powder and stiffly beaten whites rather than by steam alone. It behaves like a light muffin, so it will not form the hollow shell of a modern popover and does not need a preheated pan or a screaming-hot start.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. For a 10-minute bake in small tins you want a quick oven, 425F, with the shelf in the upper third. Check at 8 minutes; small gems this size can be done before 10.
- Gem tinsCast-iron gem pans were generally smaller than a modern muffin cup, and capacities varied from pan to pan. Filling standard 12-cup muffin tins half full gives roughly 8 to 10, and those will need longer than 10 minutes.
- Salt and baking powderA full teaspoon of salt to one cup of flour is heavy by modern taste; ½ teaspoon is plenty. Two heaping teaspoons of baking powder in one cup of flour is also on the high side — the single-acting powders of the period released their gas earlier than today's double-acting kind. One and a half level teaspoons is closer to the intended lift.
- Folding the whitesThe hinge of the recipe is the last instruction. Have the batter fully mixed and the tins greased before you beat the whites, then fold them in with a light hand and get the pans into the oven immediately. Beaten whites in a baking-powder batter start losing volume the moment they are stirred.
- FlourFive Roses was a hard-wheat Canadian bread flour. All-purpose is the nearest substitute; measure by spooning into the cup and levelling, since scooping packs in an extra ounce or more.
- ServingBest straight from the tin while still steaming, with butter. They collapse and toughen as they cool, and they do not keep.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by Lake of the Woods Milling Company as advertising for its Five Roses flour, with recipes solicited from Canadian housewives, and several versions of the same dish appear, numbered No. 1, No. 2 and so on. This one shows how loosely "popover" was used at the time: the true popover depends on a thin egg batter and a hot oven to blow it into a hollow shell, but here baking powder and whipped whites do the work, a habit borrowed from the gems and muffins that fill the rest of the section. "Gem" was a common North American term for a small quick bread baked in a heavy cast-iron pan of individual cups, and gem tins were a fixture of kitchens equipped with a wood or coal range, where a solid iron pan is often said to have evened out an uncertain oven.