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Popovers
2 cups flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 eggs 2 cups milk Sift together flour and salt. Make a well in flour, break eggs into well, add milk and stir until smooth. Pour into hot greased gem pans and bake 25 to 35 minutes in very hot oven. If taken out of oven too soon they will fall.
A popover has no leavening but steam, so the two things that matter are a screaming oven and a pan that is already hot when the batter hits it. Everything else in this recipe is forgiving.
- "Very hot oven"Read that as 450F. Some cooks drop to 350F for the last ten minutes to dry the shells out; the original bakes straight through at the high heat, which works if your oven holds temperature.
- Gem pansCast-iron gem pans were the standard muffin tin of the period, with deep rounded cups. A modern popover pan or a heavy muffin tin does the same job. Grease it and heat it in the oven until the fat shimmers before filling.
- Fill the cups two-thirdsThe recipe gives no guidance. This quantity of batter is generous: expect roughly a dozen in a standard muffin tin, or two panfuls of a six-cup popover pan.
- The batter is thinTwo cups flour to two cups milk plus eggs gives something closer to heavy cream than to muffin batter. That is correct. Stir only until smooth; a rest of 20 to 30 minutes at room temperature helps the flour hydrate and the eggs lose their chill.
- No baking powder is missingThere is no chemical leavening here and none is wanted. The rise comes entirely from water in the batter flashing to steam and inflating the egg-and-flour shell.
- Do not open the doorDo not pull them early -- The line about falling if taken out too soon is the hinge of the recipe. The structure is set by dried, coagulated egg protein, so if the walls are still damp they will collapse. Lean towards the long end of the 25-to-35-minute range and look for deep brown, rigid shells.
- ServingPierce each one with a knife tip on coming out of the oven to let steam escape if you want them to stay crisp, and eat them within a few minutes. They do not hold.
Popovers are the American descendant of English batter puddings — the same flour, egg and milk mixture that becomes Yorkshire pudding when poured into hot beef drippings. The move from a single large pan to individual cast-iron gem cups happened over the nineteenth century, and the name, generally traced to the batter's habit of popping up over the rims of the cups, appears in American cookbooks from the 1870s onward. The recipe quietly proves that steam alone will do the work when the oven is hot enough.