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Popovers
Sift together one cup of sifted flour, one-fourth teaspoon of salt; gradually beat in a cup of milk and an egg beaten until light. Beat two minutes with a Dover beater, and bake about half an hour in a gem pan, buttered, in fast oven. -Mrs E. A. Wadhams.
A three-ingredient batter with nothing to hide behind: the leavening is steam alone, so the oven and the pan do all the work.
- Fast oven425F, with the oven fully preheated. A popover that goes into a merely warm oven sets before it can climb, and you get a dense muffin.
- Gem panA standard muffin tin. One cup of flour, one cup of milk and one egg fills six to eight cups about two-thirds full — call it six popovers. Deep-walled popover pans give taller shells but are not required.
- Dover beaterThe hand-cranked rotary beater. A hand mixer on medium for two minutes, or a blender for thirty seconds, does the same job: the point is to work air and a smooth, thin batter, not to develop the flour.
- Batter consistencyIt should be roughly the thickness of heavy cream and pour freely. Lumps are the enemy of a good rise; strain if the whisk leaves any.
- Buttered, and hotButtered -- Butter the cups generously. The recipe says only that the pan is buttered; some later methods preheat the pan so the batter hits hot metal, but that is optional here.
- Do not open the ovenLeave the door shut for the first 20 minutes. A draught of cool air collapses the shells before the crust has firmed.
- DonenessThirty minutes gives deep brown, rigid walls. If they are pale they will sag; a few extra minutes, and a small slit in each to vent steam, keeps the interior from going soggy.
- Why it sits under Baking Powder BreadsNo baking powder -- There is no baking powder in this recipe at all. Where such recipes appear among quick breads — anything raised without yeast — popovers are the extreme case, raised entirely by steam and egg.
Popovers are the American descendant of the English batter pudding, the same flour-milk-egg mixture that becomes Yorkshire pudding when it is baked in beef drippings; the name is generally traced to the way the batter pops over the rims of its pan. They spread through nineteenth-century American cookbooks partly because the cast-iron "gem pan" became a standard piece of kitchen equipment, and the Dover Stamping Company's rotary egg beater, patented in the 1870s, made two minutes of vigorous beating a household possibility rather than an arm-wrecking chore. The recipe comes attributed to Mrs. E. A. Wadhams — a contributor's name attached to a contributed recipe, in the manner of the period.