Home › Biscuits, Breakfast Cakes, Etc › Pop-overs
Pop-overs
½ cup milk 2 eggs 1/2 teaspoon melted butter Mix salt and flour; add milk gradually, in order to obtain a smooth batter. Add egg, beaten until light, and butter; beat two minutes, - using egg-beater, - turn into hissing hot buttered iron gem pans, and bake thirty to thirty-five minutes in a hot oven. They may be baked in buttered earthen cups, when the bottom will have a glazed appearance.
Small round iron gem pans are best for Pop-overs.
A plain popover batter of the 1896 school: no leavening but steam, so everything depends on a thin batter and a violently hot pan.
- The hingeThe pans must be genuinely hissing hot and greased before the batter goes in. Batter poured into a cool pan sets before the steam can lift it, and you get muffins with damp centres instead of hollow shells.
- Gem pansAn iron gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin tin with deep round cups. A cast-iron popover pan or a standard muffin tin works; preheat it empty in the oven, then butter and fill quickly.
- "A hot oven"The book gives no temperatures, only descriptions; a hot oven is conventionally taken as somewhere around 425-450F. Many cooks now start at 450F and drop to 350F after the first fifteen minutes so the walls set without the tops scorching.
- Batter consistencyAdd the milk to the flour gradually, as directed, then aim for something close to heavy cream. Lumps and thickness both cost you rise.
- BeatingTwo minutes with a rotary egg-beater goes faster with an electric hand mixer, or a short blitz in a blender. Some cooks rest the batter fifteen minutes before baking.
- Don't open the doorThe full thirty to thirty-five minutes should pass uninterrupted. Popovers pulled early, or hit with cool air, collapse. Pierce each one with a knife tip as it comes out to let steam escape.
- Earthen cupsThe glazed bottom the recipe mentions is what you get from ceramic, which heats more slowly and gently. Iron gives the crisper, taller result.
- YieldThe flour and salt quantities are missing from this text, so the yield can only be estimated; a batter on this scale should fill roughly six small cups. Serve immediately; they deflate within minutes of leaving the oven.
Popovers are the American descendant of English batter puddings, the same flour-milk-egg mixture that becomes Yorkshire pudding when it is poured into hot beef drippings. The name is traditionally explained as describing what the batter does: it pops over the rim of the cup as the steam inflates it, though this is folk etymology rather than documented origin. Fannie Farmer's insistence on "small round iron gem pans" reflects the heavy cast-iron gem pans then in use, which held heat well enough to shock the batter into rising at a time when oven temperatures could not be set, only judged.