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Graham Puffs
2 cups graham flour 1 teaspoon sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 cups milk 3 eggs Mix the dry ingredients; add the milk, then the eggs beaten until very light; beat for three minutes; turn into hot buttered gem pans and bake in a moderate oven for about half an hour. 1 cake compressed yeast
A popover-style batter leavened only by steam and beaten egg, which makes the preheated pan the whole of the technique. Two oddities on the page need clearing up before you start.
- The stray yeast lineThe trailing "1 cake compressed yeast" belongs to no step in these instructions and looks like a stray line carried over from an adjacent recipe. Ignore it; the eggs and steam do the lifting.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin tin, sometimes with oval or shell-shaped cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; the important part is that it be cast iron or heavy steel and screaming hot with melted butter in it when the batter goes in.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, in Mrs. Fryer's day stone-ground with the bran left in. Modern whole-wheat flour is the nearest thing; it drinks more liquid than white flour, so let the batter stand a couple of minutes before judging it.
- Oven temperatureA "moderate oven" is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F; the book gives no number. At that heat these will rise modestly and set into dense, tender-crumbed rolls rather than hollow popovers. If you want the dramatic hollow shell, start hotter -- around 425F for the first 15 minutes, then drop -- but that is a departure from what is written.
- Batter consistencyTwo cups milk to two cups flour plus three eggs gives a thin, pourable batter, much looser than a muffin batter. That is correct; resist the urge to thicken it.
- The three minutes of beatingThis is not decorative. The beating works air into the batter, and with no chemical leavening in the recipe that trapped air plus the steam from the milk and eggs is all the lift there is. Do it with a whisk or a mixer, not a few stirs of a spoon.
- Yield and servingRoughly a dozen, depending on the size of the cups; the recipe gives no yield. Serve straight from the oven with butter; steam-risen breads like these are best eaten hot and lose their lightness as they cool.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian preacher and diet reformer of the 1830s who argued that unsifted, coarsely ground wheat, eaten in plain unstimulating bread, was the foundation of health and temperance. His name outlived his movement and attached itself to the flour, the cracker and a whole family of American whole-meal breakfast breads that were still standard cookbook fare when Mrs. Fryer was teaching. The puff itself is a popover by another name: the same egg-and-milk batter poured into blistering-hot iron cups, a trick that predates chemical leavening and belongs to the era of the wood range, when a cook judged an oven by hand and kept her gem pans heating in it as a matter of habit.