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Pop-Overs
2 eggs 1½ cups milk 1½ cups flour 1/4 teaspoon salt Beat the eggs together; stir in the milk; add gradually the sifted flour and salt; beat for five minutes and strain through a sieve. Butter gem pans and set them in a quick oven to heat. When hot fill each pan about one third full of batter; return to the oven and bake about twenty-five minutes. Serve at once.
A plain popover batter — thinner than pancake batter and leavened by nothing but steam. Two details in the original text carry all the weight: the pans must be screaming hot before the batter goes in, and the oven must stay shut.
- The hinge: preheat the pansButtering the gem pans and heating them empty is what makes the batter climb. Cold pans give dense, damp lumps. Get the pans hot enough that the butter sizzles when the batter hits.
- "Quick oven"Generally taken as roughly 400–450°F. Some cooks drop to 350°F for the last ten minutes to dry the shells out, but the original bakes straight through at the higher heat.
- Do not open the doorUnstated here but worth observing — the structure is held up by steam until the egg and starch set. Opening the oven early can collapse them.
- Gem pansHeavy cast-iron muffin pans with deep, rounded cups. A modern popover pan or a standard metal muffin tin both work; the deeper the cup, the taller the rise.
- Filling one third fullThat is deliberate. The batter roughly triples. Filling halfway gives you a mushroom of overflow welded to the pan rim.
- Beating and strainingFive minutes by hand works in air; a blender does it in thirty seconds. Straining catches unmixed flour and chalazae from the eggs.
- YieldThey are best within minutes of leaving the oven; a slit in the side lets steam out if they must wait.
- The stray line at the end"2 eggs 1 cup milk" is the head of the next recipe on the leaf, not part of this one. Ignore it.
- Filed oddlyThis appears under Frozen Desserts; it is a hot bread, not a dessert.
Popovers are the American descendant of English batter puddings — the same eggs-milk-flour formula that goes under a roast as Yorkshire pudding, baked instead in individual iron cups so each one puffs into its own hollow shell. The name is generally traced to the nineteenth century and to the batter's habit of popping over the rims of the pans, and the cups themselves were long called gem pans, after the small quick breads called gems that were baked in them. Loose-leaf cookbooks like this one were sold as binders so a housekeeper could add, remove and reorder pages at will, which is why a hot bread can end up sitting in the frozen dessert section.