Home › Breads, Biscuits, Etc. › Pop Overs
Pop Overs
One egg, white and yolk beaten separately, 1 cupful of milk, 1 cupful of flour, a pinch of salt.
Mix salt and flour; add milk gradually, in order to obtain a smooth batter. Add egg beaten until light; beat two minutes, turn into hissing hot, iron, greased gem pans. Bake thirty minutes in a hot oven.
A minimal popover batter — one egg, one cup each of milk and flour — that depends almost entirely on heat and steam. Two details in the original do the real work: the pans must be genuinely hot before the batter touches them, and the oven must not be opened.
- The hinge: hissing hot pansGrease the pans, then heat them empty in the oven until a drop of water skitters. Batter poured into cold tins will bake into dense little muffins instead of climbing.
- "Hot oven"In period usage roughly 425-450F. Some modern bakers start at 450F for the first 15 minutes and drop to 350F for the remainder to set the shells without scorching.
- Gem pansCast-iron trays of individual cups. A cast-iron popover pan or a heavy muffin tin substitutes; deep, straight-sided cups give the best rise. Fill each about half full.
- Beating the egg separatelyA common instruction in nineteenth-century recipes, but popovers rise from steam rather than trapped air, and whisking the whole egg into the batter generally gives much the same result.
- Batter consistencyAdding the milk gradually to the flour is the point of the instruction; the batter should end up thin, roughly like heavy cream, and free of lumps.
- Do not open the ovenThe recipe's thirty minutes assumes an undisturbed oven. Opening the door early collapses the popovers before the walls have set. Check only in the last five minutes.
- YieldThis quantity makes about 6 small popovers, or 4 large ones. Serve immediately; they deflate and soften within minutes of leaving the oven.
Popovers are the American descendant of English batter puddings — the same eggs-milk-flour mixture that becomes Yorkshire pudding when poured into hot beef drippings. The name is generally traced to the way the batter pops up over the rim of the pan as its steam expands. They are cheap food because the ingredients are as cheap as bread gets and there is no leavening to buy: one egg, a cup of milk and a cup of flour stretch into half a dozen hollow rolls, the volume coming free from the oven. Cast-iron gem pans, mentioned here as a matter of course, were a fixture of nineteenth-century kitchens and were used for everything from cornbread to muffins; their mass is exactly what makes the trick work, holding enough heat to flash the batter into steam on contact.