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Lapland Bread
1 quart of flour. 1 quart of cream. 1 teaspoonful of salt. Twelve eggs (whites and yolks beaten separately and very light). Put the whites in batter the last thing, beat very light, bake in a quick<??> in small tins, which must be perfectly dry and sprinkled with a little flour before being greased. A delicious bread.--Mrs. Dr. J.
A Plainer Recipe for the Same. 1 pint of flour. 1 pint of milk. 2 eggs. Beat the eggs well and stir in the flour and milk. Bake in little pans.
This is a popover-type batter bread: no yeast, no chemical leavening, all lift from eggs and steam. The two versions are wildly different in richness, and the plainer one is closer to a Yorkshire pudding batter.
- The hinge: heat and steamNothing raises these but egg foam and steam, so the oven and the tins must be hot when the batter goes in. A slow start gives flat, damp little cakes.
- "A quick oven"The word after "quick" is lost in the original, but a quick oven is usually equated with roughly 400-450F. Bake until deeply puffed and set -- probably in the region of 15-20 minutes for muffin-sized tins -- and resist opening the door early.
- MeasuresA quart of flour is about 4 cups, near 1 lb; a quart of cream is 4 cups. The plainer recipe halves both to a pint each. Nineteenth-century flour was softer than modern all-purpose, so the batter may want a little extra liquid to reach a thick pouring consistency.
- Cream"Cream" in a kitchen of this date would have been the top skimmed off unhomogenised milk, of no fixed fat content; something in the range of light cream is a reasonable modern stand-in, though skimmed cream could be a good deal richer.
- Small tinsGem pans or iron muffin tins are meant; a modern popover pan or a standard muffin tin both work. Note the order given: dry the tins, sprinkle with flour, then grease -- the reverse of the usual modern sequence.
- Whites lastBeat the whites to soft, glossy peaks and fold them in just before the tins go in the oven. A stiff, dry meringue folds in badly and leaves streaks.
- YieldBoth are large batters for their tins: the rich version, with a dozen eggs, will fill well over two dozen muffin cups, and the plainer version a dozen or more, depending on tin size.
- ServingEat hot from the tin with butter. Like other egg-and-steam batters they collapse and toughen as they cool; the recipe itself simply calls the result "a delicious bread."
Lapland cakes, Lapland bread, and Lapland rolls turn up across nineteenth-century American cookbooks, generally as an eggy batter baked in small tins, and generally with the same puzzle: no one has ever satisfactorily explained the connection to Lapland. The name is generally treated as a fanciful borrowing rather than evidence of Scandinavian origin, of a piece with the era's taste for exotic labels on domestic baking. The dish itself belongs to the large family of unleavened batter breads raised by egg and steam, cousins to the popover and to Yorkshire pudding. Its appearance in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), a compilation of contributions from named Virginia housewives, is characteristic of that book's economy: a lavish version from one contributor's household, followed by "a plainer recipe for the same" for cooks who did not have a dozen eggs and a quart of cream to spare.