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Henrietta Bread
1 pint of flour. 1 pint of sweet milk. 2 eggs, beaten separately. 1 tablespoonful of lard or butter.
Make the consistency of poor man's pudding. Bake in cups--Mrs. K.
A thin egg batter baked in cups — in structure this is a popover, and it behaves like one. The instructions assume you already know what a batter bread should look like, so the hinge is consistency and oven heat.
- The measuresA pint here is a measure of volume, not weight: 1 pint flour is 2 cups (roughly 8–9 oz), 1 pint sweet milk is 2 cups. "Sweet milk" simply means fresh whole milk as opposed to buttermilk or soured milk.
- "Consistency of poor man's pudding"Poor man's pudding was an economical milk pudding; period versions vary, some rice- or bread-based, some a plain baked batter, so the intended thickness is a matter of inference. A pourable batter about the thickness of heavy cream — thinner than pancake batter — is a reasonable reading. If it seems too thick, thin with a little more milk rather than adding flour.
- Eggs beaten separatelyThe phrase indicates yolks and whites are beaten apart, the whites folded in last. That is the only added leavening — there is no soda, baking powder or yeast — with steam doing the rest of the work, so handle the folded batter gently and get it into the oven at once.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no oven direction. Batter breads of this kind are baked hot, and 425–450F is a reasonable modern equivalent, hot enough to turn the milk to steam fast enough to inflate the cups. Cooler than that and they risk setting into damp custardy pucks instead of rising.
- The cupsCast-iron gem pans, earthenware custard cups or a modern muffin or popover tin all work. Grease them well with the same lard or butter called for in the batter and heat them in the oven before filling, two-thirds full.
- Timing and yieldExpect roughly 25–35 minutes, until well risen and deeply browned; opening the oven early will collapse them. Two cups of flour and a pint of milk makes a good deal of batter — upwards of a dozen standard muffin cups, or a full tin of popovers.
- SaltNone is listed. Half a teaspoon in the flour makes the difference between bland and bread.
- ServingThese are meant to come to the table hot from the oven with butter, alongside a meal, and they deflate within minutes of cooling. They do not keep.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housewives, devotes an unusual amount of space to hot breads — batter breads, spoon breads, egg breads, gem breads — because a Southern breakfast or supper table was expected to produce something freshly baked at every sitting. Recipes like this one are signed only with an initial ("Mrs. K."), and they measure by the pint and compare consistency to another dish the reader is assumed to have made that week. The technique — a slack egg batter poured into preheated iron cups and blasted with heat until it climbs — is the same one behind Yorkshire pudding and the New England popover; American gem pans made it a routine household operation. Who Henrietta was is not recorded, and naming a bread or cake for a friend or relative was common practice in these community collections.