Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › German Puffs (II)
German Puffs (II)
Mrs. E. P. Thomas.
One pint sweet milk, four eggs, five tablespoons flour, and a little salt. Bake three quarters of an hour.
This is a popover batter in all but name, and like all such batters it lives or dies by oven heat. The original gives none, so that is the first thing to settle.
- The hinge: a hot oven, unopenedBatters of this kind need to hit strong heat so the steam inflates them before the shell sets. Start at 425F for the first 20 minutes, then drop to 350F for the remainder, and do not open the door until the puffs are browned and firm.
- One pint of milkTwo cups. With four eggs and only five tablespoons of flour, the batter will be very thin, closer to cream than pancake batter. That is correct; the liquid is what turns to steam.
- VesselsThe original names no vessel; gem pans or individual cups are the likely intent for a batter of this kind. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works, filled about half full; a popover pan gives more height. Grease heavily, since there is no fat in the batter itself.
- Three quarters of an hourReasonable for a deep popover pan or one large dish, long for shallow muffin cups. In a regular muffin tin check at 30 minutes and pull them when the sides are rigid and dry.
- FlourNineteenth-century household flour was generally softer than modern bread flour, though it varied. All-purpose is the right substitute; sift it so the thin batter does not go lumpy.
- Preheat the panNot in the original, but the usual modern practice: put the greased pan in the oven while it heats and pour the batter into hot cups. The rise is noticeably better.
- Yield and servingEight to twelve puffs depending on the pan. "German puffs" in books of this period were generally a dessert, and comparable puddings are often served the moment they leave the oven with a hard sauce, a lemon or wine sauce, or simply sugar and cream. They collapse within minutes.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from recipes contributed by named local women and sold for charity, which is why this entry carries almost no instruction: contributors wrote for cooks who already knew what a puff was. The dish belongs to the large family of egg-and-milk batters baked in fierce heat that includes Yorkshire pudding, the Dutch baby and what Americans came to call the popover, a term that spread in cookbooks late in the century. "German puff" appears in English and American receipt books too, and the German attribution is conventional rather than documented; it signalled a light baked pudding rather than any particular regional origin. The near-total absence of flour relative to milk and egg is the older style, and it produces a puff that is more custard than cake at the bottom and hollow at the top.