Snow Puffs
2½ cups flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 4 egg whites teaspoon salt Cream butter; add sugar, flour, baking powder and salt alternately with milk. Beat well; add the stiffly beaten whites; steam forty-five minutes in buttered popover cups. Serve with strawberry sauce.
A steamed white cake baked in individual cups — light, damp-crumbed, and meant to be eaten warm under fruit sauce. The printed ingredient list here is incomplete, which changes how you have to approach it.
- The list is truncatedAs printed, the recipe names butter, sugar and milk only in the method, never in the quantities. The salt line has also lost its fraction (½ or 1 teaspoon; the book does not say). For a batter of 2½ cups flour with 3 teaspoons baking powder and 4 whites, the period standard would be roughly ½ cup butter, 1 to 1½ cups sugar and about 1 cup milk, but that is inference, not what the book says.
- Popover cupsDeep, straight-sided individual cups, cast iron or heavy earthenware, holding about ⅓ to ½ cup. Ovenproof ramekins or a deep muffin tin stand in. Butter them thoroughly; steamed batter grips.
- How to steamSet the filled cups on a rack in a wide pot over an inch or two of simmering water, cover, and keep the water at a bare simmer for the full 45 minutes. Cover each cup loosely with foil or a buttered paper so condensate from the lid does not pool on the surface. Top up the water if it runs low.
- Why steam rather than bakeSteam holds the surface at 212F, so nothing browns and nothing crusts. The result is pale, very moist and closer to a pudding than a cake — the point of the dish, not a shortcoming.
- Folding the whitesBeat the whites stiff but not dry and fold them in last, in two additions, cutting rather than stirring. Both the whites and the baking powder are doing lift work here, and a deflated batter steams into something dense.
- DonenessA skewer into the centre should come out clean and the puff should spring back. If it is still wet at 45 minutes, give it another 5 to 10 rather than raising the heat.
- Yield and servingExpect eight to ten cups from this quantity. Unmould while hot, and serve immediately with the strawberry sauce — steamed puddings tighten and go gummy as they cool.
Steamed individual puddings like this one sat in the gap between cake and pudding on American dessert tables, and they survived into the early twentieth century partly because a covered pot on the range was more reliable than a coal oven whose temperature nobody could read. Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, so a good deal of the book leans toward cocoa and confectionery; the dessert chapter also carries plain household standbys like this one, which use no chocolate at all. The name is descriptive rather than historical anchor "snow" for the whiteness that steaming preserves and the beaten whites that lighten it, a naming habit shared with snow pudding and snow cake, both of them egg-white desserts kept deliberately pale.