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Dessert Puffs
Mrs. N. C. Gridley.
One pint sweet milk, scant pint flour, three eggs, (whites and yolks beaten separately); bake in cups. To be eaten with liquid sauce.
This is a popover batter under an older name, and it reads as thin as it should. The recipe assumes a cook who knows what a hot cup of batter does in a hot oven, so most of what is missing is oven heat and timing.
- The hinge: a very hot oven, undisturbedThere is no leavening here beyond steam, so the oven must be hot enough to set the outside before the inside stops expanding. Start at 425F for about 20 minutes, then drop to 350F for another 15 to 20 to dry the interior, and do not open the door during the first stage.
- "Bake in cups"Deep individual cups, not a single dish. A popover pan is ideal; heavy ovenproof cups, a deep muffin tin or old gem pans all work. Grease them well and heat them in the oven before the batter goes in.
- MeasuresA pint is 2 cups. "Scant pint flour" means just under 2 cups, which keeps the batter pourable, roughly the consistency of heavy cream.
- Sweet milkNineteenth-century shorthand for ordinary fresh milk, as opposed to sour or buttermilk. Whole milk gives the best rise and flavour.
- SaltNone is listed. Add about half a teaspoon or the puffs taste flat.
- Separating the eggsBeat the yolks into the milk and flour until smooth, then fold in the stiffly beaten whites at the end. Many modern popover recipes skip this step and simply whisk everything; the separated method is usually said to give a slightly lighter crumb, and overmixing after folding undoes it.
- Resting the batterTwenty to thirty minutes at room temperature lets the flour hydrate and improves the rise. Give it a gentle stir before filling the cups two-thirds full.
- "Liquid sauce"A thin sweet pudding sauce, not a thickened one: melted butter, sugar and cream or milk, flavoured with vanilla, lemon or a spoon of spirits, poured over the split puffs while hot.
- YieldAbout 8 to 10 puffs in standard cups, serving four to five as dessert. They collapse as they cool, so serve them straight from the oven.
"Dessert puffs" is one of the many nineteenth-century names for what Americans later standardised as the popover: an eggy batter with no leavening but steam, generally traced back to English Yorkshire pudding, which was baked in dripping under roasting meat. In this form the batter was baked in earthenware cups or cast-iron gem pans and served as a sweet, with a pouring sauce. Its appearance here, credited to Mrs. N. C. Gridley, is typical of The Home Cook Book, a Chicago compilation of recipes contributed by named local women and sold for charitable benefit; such books preserve household formulas exactly as one cook would hand them to another, which is why the oven heat and baking time go unmentioned. Neither could be measured reliably on a wood- or coal-fired range anyway.