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Graham Pop-overs
2/3 cup entire wheat flour 1/3 cup flour 7/8 cup milk 1 egg ¼ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon melted butter Prepare and bake as Pop-overs.
A whole-wheat variant on the standard popover batter, leaning on steam rather than any chemical leavening. The instruction to "prepare and bake as Pop-overs" carries all the technique, so the essentials are worth spelling out.
- The hinge: a very hot pan and an undisturbed ovenPopovers rise on steam alone. Heat greased iron gem pans, muffin tins or deep custard cups until they are genuinely hot before the batter goes in, and avoid opening the oven early in baking, which risks collapsing the structure.
- Oven temperatureThe direction is only for a hot oven, conventionally read as somewhere in the 425-450F range. No timings or second, lower stage are given in the text, so any such schedule is a modern gloss. They should sound hollow and feel rigid before they come out.
- Entire wheat flourThis is whole-wheat flour, ground finer and sifted more thoroughly than most modern stone-ground meal. Ordinary whole-wheat flour works; sift it and expect a slightly heavier, nuttier popover than the white-flour version.
- Graham versus entire wheatThe title says graham but the ingredient line says entire wheat. In this period graham meant the coarser unbolted meal and entire wheat the finer sifting; the two were used loosely and interchangeably by many writers. Either will bake.
- 7/8 cup milkThat is one cup less two tablespoons. The batter should be thin, about the consistency of heavy cream, and is better for being beaten hard, then strained if any lumps remain.
- Melted butterThe recipe calls for 1½ teaspoons. Add it last and off the heat, so it does not set the egg.
- YieldRoughly half a dozen popovers, depending on the size of the pan. They deflate quickly, so serve them straight from the oven.
Popovers belong to the same family as the English batter pudding baked in dripping and Yorkshire pudding; the name is traditionally explained by the way the batter climbs and pops over the rim of the pan, though that account is folk etymology rather than documented fact. The whole-wheat version reflects the graham enthusiasm that ran through nineteenth-century American cooking: Sylvester Graham's advocacy of unbolted wheat meal in the 1830s gave his name to a flour, a cracker and a whole line of parallel recipes in later cookbooks. By the time Fannie Farmer was writing at the Boston Cooking School, whole-wheat variants appear beside white-flour originals in the bread and breakfast-cake chapters.