Popovers
1 cup Gold Medal flour 1/4 teaspoon salt 7/8 cup milk 1 egg 1/2 teaspoon butter Mix and sift the dry ingredients, add the milk gradually, add egg beaten until light. Beat the batter for five minutes. Have iron gem pans or stone cups well greased and hissing hot, fill half full; bake thirty to thirty-five minutes in a hot oven.
This rule when served with a rich hot sauce for dessert is called "Sunderland Pudding."
A workable popover formula, though the flour-to-liquid ratio is drier than most modern versions and the butter is nearly a rounding error.
- 7/8 cup milkThat is 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons. A full cup gives a thinner batter and a taller, hollower popover; the original ratio yields a slightly denser shell.
- "Hot oven"Around 425-450F. Many cooks start popovers at 450F for the first 15 minutes, then drop to 350F for the remainder to set the walls without scorching.
- Iron gem pans and stone cupsGem pans are heavy cast-iron muffin pans; stone cups are most likely stoneware custard cups. A cast-iron or steel popover pan is the closest modern equivalent, and a standard muffin tin works with shorter baking, nearer 20-25 minutes.
- Hissing hot pansThis is the hinge. Grease the pans and heat them in the oven until the fat shimmers, then pour the batter in and return them immediately. Cold pans give flat popovers.
- Five minutes of beatingBy hand this was how the flour was fully dissolved and the batter made smooth. A blender or whisk gets there in under a minute; overworking is not a real risk with a batter this thin, and resting it 20-30 minutes is often said to improve the rise.
- Do not open the ovenThe steam that inflates them escapes the moment the door opens, and the walls have not set until late in the bake. Wait until they are deep brown and firm.
- YieldAbout 6 popovers in a popover pan, 8 or 9 in a standard muffin tin. Serve at once; they collapse as they cool.
- The butterHalf a teaspoon does almost nothing. It can be melted into the milk or left out entirely without a noticeable difference.
Popovers are the American descendant of the batter puddings baked under roasting meat in English kitchens, of which Yorkshire pudding is the best-known survivor; the name is generally explained as describing batter that pops over the rim of its cup. The note here that the same batter served with a hot sweet sauce becomes "Sunderland Pudding" reflects a long habit in English and American cookbooks of naming batter puddings for towns and counties, and a practical thrift in which one rule did double duty as bread at dinner and pudding afterward. Its presence in a flour-milling company's cook book is no accident: a recipe with five ingredients and no leavening but steam demonstrates the flour itself, which is exactly what the book was published to sell.