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Graham Pop-overs
2/3 cup entire wheat flour 1/3 cup flour 1/4 teaspoon salt 7/8 cup milk 1 egg 1/2 teaspoon melted butter Prepare and bake as Pop-overs.
A half-whole-grain popover, leaning on the plain popover recipe printed alongside it for method. The proportions are sound; only the vocabulary and the oven need translating.
- Entire wheat flour and graham"Entire wheat" is whole wheat flour, ground to include the bran and germ. Graham flour is a coarser whole-wheat grind; either works, though the coarser the bran the less dramatically the popovers climb.
- The odd milk measure7/8 cup is one cup less two tablespoons. Measure it that way rather than eyeballing it: popover batter should pour like heavy cream, and this one is deliberately thin.
- Oven heatThe recipe names no temperature, sending the cook to the plain Pop-over recipe for method. Popovers need a hot start to generate steam; a workable modern equivalent is a hot oven, around 450F, for about 15 minutes, then dropped to about 350F for another 15 to 20 to set the shell so it does not collapse.
- The hingeDo not open the oven while they rise. The structure is steam held in a wet gluten skin; a draught of cool air at the wrong moment deflates them permanently.
- PansPeriod books call for iron gem pans or earthenware cups, preheated and well greased. A modern popover pan or deep muffin tin works; heat it in the oven before the batter goes in, and fill each cup no more than two-thirds.
- MixingBeat only until smooth, then let the batter rest 15 to 30 minutes so the bran hydrates. Whole-wheat batter thickens noticeably as it stands; thin with a spoonful of milk if it stops pouring freely.
- YieldAbout six popovers from this quantity, best eaten within minutes of leaving the oven. If they must wait, pierce each with a knife point to let steam escape.
Popovers are the American descendant of the batter puddings baked under roasting meat in English kitchens, and the name is generally traced to the way the batter pops over the rims of its cups as it rises. This graham version belongs to the later whole-grain enthusiasm associated with Sylvester Graham, whose advocacy of unbolted flour left its mark on cookery books for decades after his death; domestic-science writers of the period often offered a whole-wheat variant alongside a white-flour standard, as here. Cutting the entire wheat with a third of white flour is a practical compromise rather than a purist one, since bran cuts gluten strands and a batter made entirely of it rises poorly.