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Aerated Nut Puffs
1 teaspoon salt 1/3 cup cream 2/3 cup of milk 1 1/2 cups white flour 1/4 cup chopped nuts Mix the milk, cream and salt. Dredge the nuts in a part of the flour, and add the remainder of the flour to the milk. Beat about five minutes or until the batter is smooth and light. Lastly, fold in the chopped nuts. Bake in hot buttered gem irons, taking care to fill the cups to the level. Bake in a moderate oven for about twenty minutes.
Currants, raisins or chopped dates may be used instead of the nuts. These puffs should be served hot, as they become solid when cold.
An eggless popover in all but name: the lift comes entirely from air beaten into a thin batter and steam in a screaming-hot pan. Everything below serves that one fact.
- The hinge: heat the pan first"Hot buttered gem irons" is not a flourish. Put the buttered pan in the oven while it preheats and pour the batter into cups that are already sizzling, or the puffs will sit flat.
- Gem ironsA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin pan with small, deep cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works, preferably cast iron; this quantity fills six to eight cups "to the level," as directed.
- "Moderate oven"In books of this period a moderate oven is usually reckoned at somewhere around 350-375F. That is on the low side for a steam-raised batter; the hotter end of that range gives a more reliable rise in a modern oven, and the twenty minutes stands. Avoid opening the door until near the end of the baking.
- No leavening at allThere is no baking powder, no soda and no egg here. The five minutes of beating, plus steam from the milk and cream, is the whole of the lift, so beat hard with a whisk or an electric mixer until the batter is smooth and light, as directed.
- Cream"Cream" in a recipe of this sort is closest to today's light cream, though the fat content behind the word varied a good deal, so treat any figure as approximate. Heavy cream may well give a heavier result.
- Dredging the nutsTossing the chopped nuts in flour before folding them in helps keep them suspended rather than sinking through the batter. Fold them in at the very end, as directed, so the beaten air survives.
- Yield and servingSix to eight small puffs, enough for three or four at breakfast. The instruction to serve them hot is practical rather than decorative: the recipe itself warns that they "become solid when cold."
History: Gem pans were fixtures of American kitchens from the 1870s onward, and the batters baked in them ran from plain graham gems to enriched breakfast puffs like this one. The word "aerated" points to the period: through the later nineteenth century it was a fashionable term for bread and cakes raised by air or gas rather than yeast, and it is often connected with the commercial aerated-bread process, though how directly any given home cookbook borrowed it is hard to pin down.