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Fadges
1 cup entire wheat flour 1 cup cold water Add water gradually to flour, and beat with egg-beater until very light. Bake same as Pop-overs.
Two ingredients, no egg, no fat, no leavening — this is a popover that rises on steam alone, which makes the handling of the pan and the oven the whole recipe.
- The hinge: a screaming hot, greased panWith no egg to set the walls, the batter needs violent steam to inflate and a hot surface to seize the outside before it collapses. Grease cast-iron gem pans or a popover tin heavily and heat them in the oven until the fat shimmers before the batter goes in.
- "Bake same as Pop-overs"The book gives no oven temperatures, only a hot oven. A workable modern equivalent is to start hot, around 450F, then drop the heat later to dry the interior. Do not open the door during the first stage.
- Entire wheat flourEssentially whole wheat flour, though the period product was not identical to the modern one: it was usually milled with some of the coarsest bran sifted out. Standard supermarket whole wheat works; sift out the coarsest bran if you want more lift.
- Beating matters more than usualAir whipped in by hand is doing part of the job an egg would normally do. Beat until the batter is frothy and pale on top, and use it at once rather than letting it stand.
- Expect a modest riseEggless fadges puff far less than a standard popover and come out closer to a crisp-shelled roll than a hollow shell. That is the dish, not a failure.
- YieldAbout six small gem-pan fadges, or four in a standard popover tin. Serve straight from the oven; they soften within minutes.
- A pinch of saltThe original gives none, and the result tastes flat to a modern palate. A quarter teaspoon stirred into the flour is in keeping with the recipe's spirit.
Fadge is an old British and Irish word for a flat, thick cake or small loaf — in Ireland it still names the potato farl griddled for breakfast. What it is doing in a Boston cooking-school book is a different story: this eggless, fatless, sugarless batter of whole wheat and water belongs to the late-nineteenth-century enthusiasm for "entire wheat" as a corrective to white flour, a movement generally traced back to Sylvester Graham's earlier campaigning and carried forward by the sanitarium and dietetic cookery of Fannie Farmer's own era. The technique is the same steam-leavened trick as the Yorkshire pudding and the popover, stripped down to the barest possible ingredients.