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Pop-Overs (C flour C milk Salt egg Butter)
1 C flour 1 C milk Salt 1 egg Butter size of egg Bake in quick oven for 20 minutes. Makes 12.
Mrs. Edgar Wells.
A one-line church-supper popover: equal parts flour and milk, one egg, and a generous lump of butter. The proportions work, but the original assumes you know how popovers behave.
- The hinge: heat the panPopovers rise on steam, so the batter must hit hot, well-greased metal. Preheat the empty pan in the oven, grease it, then fill each cup no more than half full and return it immediately.
- "Quick oven"Roughly 400-425F by most period reckonings, though the term was never exact. Twenty minutes at that heat sets the shell; a further 10-15 minutes at a lower heat, around 350F, is a common modern practice so the interior dries out and the popover does not collapse.
- Butter size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Melt it and beat it into the batter, reserving a little to grease the cups. It is a rich ratio by modern standards, and half the amount still works.
- "C" and saltC is a cup. The salt is unmeasured; a scant 1/4 teaspoon per cup of flour is the usual reading.
- Batter consistencyBeat the egg, milk and butter, then whisk in the flour until it is as thin as heavy cream and free of lumps. Lumps and over-thick batter are the two common causes of a squat popover.
- Makes 12Twelve means small cups: gem pans or a standard 12-cup muffin tin, not a deep six-well popover pan. In a modern popover pan this quantity fills about six.
- Do not open the ovenThe steam that lifts them escapes the moment the door swings. Leave them alone until the last few minutes, then pierce each with a knife tip to vent and serve at once.
Popovers are generally regarded as an American descendant of English batter puddings — the same flour-milk-egg mixture that becomes Yorkshire pudding under a roasting joint, baked instead in individual cups so each one puffs into a hollow shell. The name is generally traced to the nineteenth-century habit of describing batter that "pops over" the rims of the tins as it rises. Cast-iron gem pans were widely used for them, and the recipe's brevity is typical of a community cook book: the ingredients are staples, the recipe fits on two lines, and a contributor like Mrs. Edgar Wells could assume her readers already knew what a quick oven felt like.