Corn Popovers
1 1/4 cups sifted corn meal 2 cups scalded milk 1 tablespoon melted butter 3 eggs 1/4 teaspoon salt Scald the corn meal with the milk, add butter and salt, beat thoroughly. When cool add 3 well beaten eggs, pour into hot iron gem pans and bake from thirty to thirty-five minutes in a hot oven.
A cornmeal batter raised by nothing but eggs and steam. It behaves less like a true popover than like a small, puffed spoonbread, and the two things that decide whether it works are the heat of the pan and the temperature of the mush when the eggs go in.
- Cool the mush firstScalded cornmeal holds heat far longer than it looks. If you beat eggs into it while it is still warm, they set into threads and lose the aeration that lifts these. Let it come down to barely warm — under about 110F — before the eggs go in.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no temperature; in cookery of this period the term conventionally means roughly 425-450F. Bake at about 425F for the full thirty to thirty-five minutes and avoid opening the door early, or the steam structure collapses.
- Iron gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin pan; a cast-iron popover pan or a standard metal muffin tin substitutes. Grease it and preheat it in the oven until the fat shimmers, then fill the cups about two-thirds. The batter hitting hot metal is what starts the rise.
- Cornmeal choiceFine or medium-ground meal, white or yellow, works. Coarse stone-ground meal drinks more liquid and gives a gritty, heavy result; if that is all you have, expect a denser gem.
- Don't expect a hollow shellWith no wheat flour there is no gluten, so these will not blow open into the airy caverns of a classic popover. They puff, dome, and stay moist and custardy inside — closer to a firm spoonbread in muffin form.
- Beat the eggs properlyThe eggs are the entire leavening. Beat them until pale and frothy, then fold into the cooled mush just until uniform. Over-stirring after that knocks out the air you just added.
- Yield and servingAbout ten to twelve gems in standard muffin cups, fewer in deep popover cups. Serve immediately with butter; they lose their puff quickly as they cool.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was promotional literature from the Washburn-Crosby milling company of Minneapolis, the firm that later became General Mills, and its bread chapter is essentially an argument for baking at home with a branded, consistent flour. That makes this recipe a small oddity: it contains no flour at all. Corn popovers belong to a large family of American cornmeal quick breads — spoonbread, corn gems, batter bread — that descend from the scalded-meal mushes of colonial kitchens, where boiling liquid was poured over coarse meal to soften it before baking. The popover name itself is generally traced to the same egg-and-milk batter tradition as Yorkshire pudding; popovers appear in American cookbooks from the middle of the nineteenth century, adapted to individual iron pans. Substituting cornmeal for wheat survived into books like this one, whatever the result lacks in loft.