Popovers
teaspoon salt 1 egg Mix all ingredients and beat five minutes. Pour into hissing hot buttered gem pans and bake in hot oven twenty minutes.
The ingredient list has been cut off in this transcription — only salt and one egg survive, and popovers cannot work without flour and milk. Treat what follows as guidance on method rather than a complete formula.
- Missing quantitiesThe batter as printed is incomplete: the flour and liquid are gone. Popover batters of this type generally run to roughly equal volumes of flour and milk with one egg, but the exact amounts intended here cannot be recovered from the page.
- Gem pansCast-iron gem pans are shallow, heavy, oval- or round-cupped trays. A modern popover pan or a deep muffin tin does the same job; the iron's stored heat is the point, not the shape.
- "Hissing hot"The pans go into the oven empty and greased until the butter sizzles, then the batter is poured in. This flash of bottom heat helps drive the initial steam and the hollow centre. Filling cold pans is likely to give a heavier, less hollow result.
- "Hot oven"In period usage a hot oven is roughly 400-450F. Popovers benefit from starting at the high end and being left there for the twenty minutes given, then dropped to about 350F if they need more time to dry out inside.
- Beat five minutesLong beating helped get a smooth batter by hand. A blender or stand mixer does it in under a minute; what matters is a thin, lump-free batter, ideally rested rather than over-worked.
- Do not open the doorThe rise depends on trapped steam. Opening the oven during the first part of the bake risks collapsing them.
- Yield and servingA standard one-cup-flour popover batter fills roughly six to eight cups. Serve straight from the oven with butter; they lose their puff and soften as they cool.
Popovers are the American descendant of the English batter pudding — the same flour, milk and egg mixture that becomes Yorkshire pudding when baked in beef drippings. The name is generally traced to the way the batter pops over the rim of the tin as it inflates, and it appears in American cookbooks from the nineteenth century onward. Their presence in a chocolate manufacturer's cookbook like Lowney's reflects what is often said to have been common in such volumes: the company's own products filled the confectionery and dessert chapters, while the bread, meat and vegetable sections reproduced the general household repertoire of the day so the book could serve as a complete kitchen manual rather than an advertisement.