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Breakfast Puffs
Boil a pint of milk with a quarter of a pound of butter. Stir in three-quarters of a pound of flour and let cool. Beat the whites and yolks of five eggs separately and add. Fill greased cups half full of the batter, and bake in a quick oven. Turn out on a hot plate and sprinkle with sugar.
This is a choux-type paste baked in cups rather than a true baking-powder bread, and it rises on steam and egg alone. The hinge is getting the flour properly cooked into the hot milk and butter before any egg goes in.
- The measuresA pint of milk is 2 cups; a quarter pound of butter is 1/2 cup (one stick); three-quarters of a pound of flour is roughly 2 3/4 to 3 cups. Weigh the flour if you can, since a paste this stiff is sensitive to a heavy cup.
- "Stir in the flour" means cook itAdd the flour to the milk and butter while the pan is still on the heat and beat until the paste pulls together into a smooth mass that leaves the pan sides. Flour merely stirred into hot liquid off the heat gives a pasty, raw-tasting puff.
- Cool before the eggs"Let cool" is not optional padding. The paste should drop to warm, not hot, or the eggs will scramble in it and the puffs will not climb.
- Separated eggsBeat the yolks in first, one or two at a time, until the paste is glossy, then fold in the whipped whites.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400 to 425F. Start hot and do not open the door for the first 20 minutes; the puffs set on trapped steam and collapse if it escapes early.
- The cupsThe recipe says only 'greased cups', which could mean tea cups or custard cups. Popover pans, deep muffin cups or heavy ramekins all work; grease them well and heat them before filling for a better rise.
- No baking powderThere is none in the recipe and none is needed. Adding any will coarsen the crumb and give a bready rather than hollow interior.
- Yield and servingExpect 12 to 16 puffs depending on cup size. They deflate within minutes, so turn them out, sprinkle with sugar and serve at once.
Baked egg-paste puffs of this kind sit between two older traditions: the boiled-and-beaten flour paste that French cookery calls pâte à choux, and the English batter pudding that swells in a hot oven into what Americans came to call the popover. Cookbooks of the late nineteenth century filed such things loosely. Sprinkling with sugar and sending them to table on a hot plate marks them as a breakfast sweet rather than a bread to butter.