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Pop-Overs
2 cups flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 cups milk 1 tablespoon melted butter 2 tablespoons baking powder Sift the salt and flour and baking powder; add the milk gradually, stirring constantly to get a smooth batter. Add the butter and beat two minutes. Turn into a hot buttered gem pan, and bake twenty minutes in a hot oven.
An eggless popover, which tells you most of what you need to know about how it will behave. Read the leavening note before you measure anything.
- The baking powder is the hingeTwo tablespoons (six teaspoons) for two cups of flour is about three times modern practice and is likely to taste soapy and metallic. Early single-acting powders were weaker and less consistent, but even allowing for that, 2 teaspoons is the sensible amount with today's double-acting powder.
- No eggs, so no true popA classic popover rises on steam and egg protein, which sets the shell as it inflates. Without eggs this is a chemically leavened batter bread: expect a domed, tender muffin with a slightly hollow crumb rather than a hollow, crisp-walled shell.
- Gem panA cast-iron gem pan is a muffin tin with deep, rounded cups. Any 12-cup muffin tin works; heavy cast iron gives the best browning if you have it.
- Hot ovenRoughly 425F; a period 'hot oven' covers about 400-450F. Butter the pan and heat it in the oven before the batter goes in, as the recipe implies with 'hot buttered.'
- Batter consistencyEqual volumes of flour and milk give a thin batter, about the body of heavy cream. Add the milk in stages as directed and it will come together smooth; lumps are much harder to beat out once thinned.
- Beating timeTwo minutes of beating is fine for an eggless batter, but do it before the baking powder has long to work and get the pans filled promptly.
- Yield and timingAbout ten to twelve standard muffin cups, filled two-thirds. Twenty minutes in a hot oven should be about right; avoid opening the oven early, which can check the rise. Serve hot, straight from the pan.
Popovers are the American descendant of English batter puddings baked in the dripping under a roast, and the name is generally traced to the mid-nineteenth century; the usual explanation, that it describes batter popping over the rim of its cup, is traditional rather than documented. They belong in a bread chapter because they were the quickest hot bread a cook could produce: no yeast, no waiting, no kneading.