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Tea Puffs (Bachelors' Recipe)
2¼ cups Five Roses flour 3 cups milk 3 eggs (beaten separately) 3 teaspoons melted butter Pinch of salt.
Bake in muffin tins in hot oven.
ISCUITS, muffins, popovers, have you ever seen them at their best unless Five Roses flour was used? Tell your friends about your success; show them the delicate bread-morsels your folks enjoy for breakfast. Break the crisp, golden crust; show them the evenly risen inside, soft and porous. Tell them how appetizing and digestible Five Roses flour makes biscuits, rolls and other foodstuffs. Help your friends to better bake things. See that they also secure a copy of this cook book. But, above all, see that they also use Five Roses.
This is a popover batter under another name: thin, eggy, and raised by steam alone. The absence of baking powder is not an omission, so treat the oven and the tins as the whole method.
- Hot oven means 425–450FHot oven -- read this as roughly 425-450F, and preheat fully. Preheating the greased tins is common popover practice and helps the climb, though batter poured into cold cups will still rise.
- Eggs beaten separatelyThis means yolks beaten into the liquid and whites whipped to soft peaks, then folded in last. It is the only lift the recipe has apart from steam.
- The batter is meant to be thin2¼ cups flour to 3 cups milk gives something closer to heavy cream than muffin batter. Do not thicken it; whisk until smooth and let it rest 15–30 minutes so the flour hydrates.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard spring wheat flour, generally higher in protein than American all-purpose. Bread flour, or all-purpose with a spoonful of vital wheat gluten, gives comparable wall strength.
- Fill and leave aloneFill each cup about two-thirds. Bake without opening the door until deeply browned and firm, longer for deep popover cups than for shallow muffin tins; opening early drops the oven temperature and can collapse them before the walls set.
- Butter quantityThree teaspoons of melted butter is a small amount; more fat would weigh the structure down. Grease the tins generously instead.
- YieldThis quantity of batter is closer to 16-18 standard muffin cups, or a dozen or so deep popover cups. Serve immediately; they deflate within minutes of leaving the oven.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed to buyers of its flour — by most accounts among the widely circulated Canadian cookbooks of the early twentieth century, as the closing sales pitch here makes plain. The dish itself belongs to the popover family, generally traced to the English batter puddings baked under roasting meat, in which a loose egg-and-milk batter is thrown into a fiercely hot vessel and rises on its own steam. The tag "Bachelors' Recipe" is often said to be period shorthand for something a man cooking for himself could manage: five ingredients, no measuring of leavening, no kneading, nothing to spoil but the temperature of the oven.