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Whole Wheat Puffs
2 cups whole wheat flour 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 cup milk 1 cup cream 1 egg Beat the white to a stiff froth; to the yolk add the milk and cream and beat together until perfectly mingled and foamy with air bubbles. Add the flour sifted with the salt; continue beating vigorously for eight or ten minutes, then fold in the beaten white and turn at once into hot iron gem pans and bake. Fill the irons full, bake from thirty to thirty-five minutes.
This is a popover batter in all but name: no baking powder, no soda, nothing but egg, liquid and air beaten into a thin batter. The whole wheat flour makes it heavier than a white-flour popover, so the beating and the hot pan are doing all of the lifting.
- The hinge: preheat the pan"Turn at once into hot iron gem pans" is the whole recipe. Grease the pan and heat it in the oven until the fat shimmers, then fill and get it back in immediately. Batter poured into a cold pan will bake into dense little cakes rather than puffing.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron pan of muffin-like cups, in various patterns (oval, round or straight-sided depending on the maker). A modern cast-iron muffin pan or a popover pan works; a light aluminium or silicone pan will not hold as much heat.
- Oven temperatureThe original says only "bake." For a batter of this type, 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the walls, then 350F for the remaining time, which lands within the thirty to thirty-five minutes given. Do not open the door during the first stage.
- Whole wheat flour then and nowThe whole wheat sold when this book was printed was probably coarser and more variable than today's. Whole wheat continues to absorb liquid as it stands; if the batter thickens noticeably, let it rest five minutes and check it again before adjusting anything.
- The creamCream at the turn of the century was not standardised, and a cup of it may well have been closer to today's light cream or half-and-half than to heavy whipping cream. Half-and-half is a reasonable substitution here.
- Eight to ten minutes of beatingThat timing assumes a hand whisk or a rotary egg beater. A stand mixer on medium does the same work in three or four minutes, and an electric hand mixer in about five. You are looking for a visibly aerated, foamy batter.
- Folding the whiteBeat the white to soft-stiff peaks, not dry, and fold it in with a spatula in two additions. Whisking it in destroys the air you just spent ten minutes building.
- Yield and servingAbout 10 to 12 puffs in a standard muffin pan, or 6 in a popover pan. Best served hot from the oven with butter, as steam-risen batters tend to slump as they cool.
Gem pans and the batters baked in them were a fixture of American kitchens through the second half of the nineteenth century, and "gems," "puffs" and "popovers" were often the same idea under different names: a thin egg batter that rises on steam alone in a screaming-hot iron cup. Whole wheat versions like this one belong to the health-reform current that ran through American cookery from the Graham movement onward, when unbolted flour was promoted as more wholesome than white.