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Muffins Without Eggs
Dissolve one teaspoon of soda in one quart of buttermilk, add a little salt and enough flour to make a stiff batter (two or three tablespoons of sour cream will make them richer). Bake in gem-pans in a hot oven.
POP-OVERS-One cup of sweet milk; one egg; one cup of flour; one teaspoon sugar and a little pinch of salt. Bake in heated and buttered gem-pans and have the oven very hot.
Two separate recipes are run together here, as often happens in this book's tighter pages: an eggless buttermilk muffin, then popovers. Both depend on a genuinely hot oven and a preheated pan.
- Gem-pansGem pans are the cast-iron muffin pans of the period, usually with shallow oval or round cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; a heavy cast-iron pan gives the crust the recipe expects.
- Oven heatThe book gives no temperatures, only 'hot' for the muffins and 'very hot' for the popovers; in modern terms that is roughly a 400-425F oven for the muffins and hotter still for the popovers. Lowering the heat partway through the popovers is a modern refinement, not part of the original instruction.
- Flour is unmeasuredA quart of buttermilk will take a large quantity of flour, likely well upwards of six cups, to reach a stiff batter, and the figure depends on your flour. Add it in stages and stop when the batter mounds on the spoon rather than pouring.
- Soda and buttermilkOne teaspoon of soda for a quart of buttermilk is light by modern standards, and there is no baking powder to back it up. Mix and get the pans filled promptly, as the lift begins as soon as the acid meets the soda.
- Sour creamThe optional two or three tablespoons of "sour cream" meant naturally soured heavy cream. Commercial cultured sour cream or creme fraiche stands in directly.
- Sweet milkIn the popover recipe "sweet milk" simply means fresh unsoured milk, as against the buttermilk above. Whole milk gives the best rise.
- Popover proportionsOne egg to a cup each of flour and milk is a lean ratio; most modern popover formulas use two eggs for that much flour and rise higher. Preheating and buttering the pan, as instructed, matters more than anything else here, and the oven door should stay shut for the first 15 minutes.
- YieldThe buttermilk batter is a large batch, filling two to three dozen muffin cups. The popover batter makes roughly 6, and the cups should be filled no more than half full.
Eggless recipes like this one were a standing feature of American cookbooks well into the twentieth century, when eggs were seasonal and expensive rather than a year-round staple, and a farm household with a surplus of buttermilk from churning had strong reason to bake with it. The soda-and-buttermilk pairing is the older chemical leavening, predating reliable commercial baking powder, and it does double duty here: the acid provides the gas and the tang that eggs and butter would otherwise have to cover for. The popovers appended below are the same family as the English batter pudding cooked under roasting meat, and the name is generally traced to the way the batter pops up over the rim of the pan; American books had adopted "popover" by the later nineteenth century, and Butterick, whose cookbook accompanied its pattern and magazine business, treats both as everyday breakfast breads rather than anything special.