Graham Puffs
2 cups graham flour 1 teaspoon sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 cups milk 3 eggs Mix the dry ingredients; beat the eggs till very light; add the milk to the dry ingredients slowly, beat in the eggs and continue beating for three minutes. Turn the batter into well greased warm muffin pans and bake in a moderate oven for half an hour. If the taste of rye be liked half a pint of rye meal may be substituted for the graham.
This is a popover batter in all but name: no baking powder, no soda, nothing to lift it but eggs, steam and a hot pan. That fact governs everything else.
- The hinge is heat, not timeWith no chemical leavening, the puff comes from steam expanding faster than the crust sets. Grease the pans and get them genuinely hot before the batter goes in, and open the oven as little as possible during the first twenty minutes.
- "Moderate oven"Conventionally taken to mean somewhere around 350F; the book gives no temperature. Modern popover practice starts hotter, 425F for the first 15 minutes before dropping to 350F to dry the interiors; at a steady moderate heat for half an hour you are likelier to get dense, custardy muffins than hollow shells. Either result is edible, but know which one you are aiming at.
- Graham flourCoarsely ground whole wheat, bran and germ included. Ordinary whole wheat flour works; stone-ground is closer in texture. The bran cuts gluten strands, so these will never rise as high as a white-flour popover.
- The rye substitution"Half a pint of rye meal" is one cup, against two cups of graham in the main recipe. The text reads as a straight swap for the graham, though the halved quantity is odd; some cooks may prefer to read it as replacing only part of the flour, since rye contributes little structure.
- BeatingThe recipe calls for three minutes of beating after the eggs go in. A whisk or a stand mixer on medium both do it. Modern practice often rests such a batter 20 to 30 minutes to hydrate the bran, though the recipe as written goes straight into the pans.
- PansMuffin pans give squat puffs; a deep popover pan or heavy custard cups give taller ones. Grease well, including the top rim, since the batter climbs.
- Yield and servingAbout 12 standard muffins. Serve hot from the pan with butter, honey or jam; they collapse and toughen within minutes of cooling, and do not keep.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and temperance lecturer who in the 1830s preached that unsifted whole-meal bread was morally and physically superior to the fine white loaf. His name stuck to the flour long after his dietary system faded, and by the time this book was printed graham flour was simply an ordinary pantry item sold beside white flour. Recipes like this one teach cooks the eggs-and-milk batter technique that Americans came to call the popover, a name generally traced to the mid-nineteenth century for a batter that popped over the rims of its pans. The optional rye is a reminder that in northern and midwestern kitchens of the period, rye meal is often said to have been a familiar everyday grain rather than a specialty flour.