Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Pop-Overs
Pop-Overs
Mix to a smooth batter two breakfast cupfuls of flour and milk and the yolks of a couple of eggs, together with a teaspoonful of salt. Butter thoroughly a dozen small earthenware jars, and place them in a pan in the oven to heat; then beat the whites of a couple of eggs to a stiff froth, and mix in with the rest, and afterwards put the batter into the heated, buttered jars, and set them in the oven and bake until they rise well and are of a brown color at the sides, where they have risen above the jars; turn them out into cups, and serve not.
A workable popover batter, though the measurement is loosely worded and the oven temperature is left entirely to the cook. The one thing that matters is heat: the jars must be genuinely hot when the batter goes in, or nothing pops.
- "Two breakfast cupfuls of flour and milk"This is genuinely ambiguous — it can be read as two cups of each, or two cups in total split between them. Popover batter is conventionally equal volumes of flour and milk, so two cups of each is the likelier reading, but that is a large batch for two eggs; standard modern ratios use two eggs per cup of flour. A breakfast cup was an unstandardised measure, generally larger than a teacup and usually reckoned at roughly 8 fluid ounces or more.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. Popovers need a hot oven — 425 to 450F — for the first 15 to 20 minutes to generate the steam that inflates them, then a drop to around 350F to set the walls without burning.
- The hinge: preheated, buttered vesselsThe instruction to butter the jars and heat them in the oven before filling is the whole technique. Batter poured into a cold cup will bake into a dense pancake. Fill the hot vessels no more than half to two-thirds full.
- "Small earthenware jars"The recipe says only that they are small and earthenware; for popovers the depth of the vessel matters more than the material. Use a cast-iron popover pan, deep muffin cups, or ovenproof ceramic ramekins. Wide shallow tins give squat results.
- Beating the whites separatelyA step common in older batter recipes. Modern practice blends whole eggs straight into the batter and relies on steam alone for lift, which works at least as well; folded whites are not harmful, but much of the foam collapses in the oven.
- Keep the door shutThe original gives no instruction on this, but a draught of cold air in the first 20 minutes will deflate them. Judge by the brown collar rising over the rim, as described here.
- "Serve not"A typesetter's slip for serve hot. They are best within minutes; pierce each one with a knife tip on turning out so trapped steam escapes and the interior does not go soggy.
- YieldA dozen small jars, per the text.
Popovers are the American descendant of the English batter pudding — the same flour-milk-egg batter that becomes Yorkshire pudding when poured into beef drippings. Baked in individual pots rather than one large dish, the batter climbs and bursts over the rim, which is generally taken to be the origin of the name. They are cheap in ingredients and impressive on arrival, and they sit in the Waldorf's kitchen notes: nothing but flour, milk, eggs and a very hot pan, timed to reach the table still standing.