Balloons
6 eggs. 7 tablespoonfuls of flour. 1 quart of milk. 1 teacup of sugar. 1 tablespoonful of butter. 1 tablespoonful of lard.
Cream the butter and lard with the flour. Beat the eggs and sugar together. Mix the milk in gradually, bake quickly, and eat with sauce.--Mrs. Dr. E.
A batter pudding of the popover family, thin enough to be poured and baked hot so it inflates. The instructions are compressed even by the standards of this book, so a few things need spelling out.
- The hinge: heat"Bake quickly" points to a hot oven; in a modern range roughly 425-450F, with a hot, well-greased vessel, answers to it. The lift comes from steam and expanding egg rather than any raising agent, so a lukewarm pan or a moderate oven gives flat, eggy discs instead.
- TeacupA nineteenth-century teacup is smaller than the 8-oz measuring cup, commonly reckoned at somewhere between a half and three-quarters of one; the book does not define it. That much sugar to a quart of milk gives a sweet but not cloying pudding.
- The batter is meant to be thinSeven tablespoonfuls of flour to a quart of milk and six eggs is closer to a crepe batter than a cake batter. That is deliberate; the eggs, not the flour, do the lifting.
- Order of mixingThe fats are rubbed into the flour, then the beaten eggs and sugar go in, then the milk gradually to avoid lumps. Strain the finished batter if it looks anything but smooth, and let it stand 20-30 minutes before baking.
- VesselsNo pan is named. Individual cups, deep muffin tins or small earthenware ramekins all work; fill them about two-thirds. Grease with lard or butter and preheat them in the oven before the batter goes in.
- LardLard was a common shortening in Virginia kitchens of the period. Much modern shelf-stable lard is hydrogenated and behaves differently; butter for the whole two tablespoonfuls is a fair substitute here, since the fat is a minor part of the formula.
- Timing and donenessExpect 20-30 minutes for individual cups, longer for one large dish. Do not open the oven during the first two-thirds of the bake. They will sink as they cool, which is normal.
- Yield and sauceA quart of milk makes enough for eight to ten servings. "Sauce" in this book means a sweet pudding sauce -- hard sauce, or a wine or lemon sauce -- served over the puddings straight from the oven.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many entries end with a signature like "Mrs. Dr. E." and assume the reader already knows what pan to use and how long to bake. Balloons belong to the long English line of batter puddings that runs from dripping pudding through Yorkshire pudding to the American popover, all of them built on the same discovery: a very slack batter of eggs, milk and a little flour, hit with fierce heat, will inflate into a hollow shell. Sweetened and served with a pudding sauce, it becomes a dessert rather than a meat accompaniment. The name is descriptive rather than regional, and similar puffed batter puddings appear under a scatter of local names in nineteenth-century American manuscript and community cookbooks.