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German Puffs
H. M. Brewer.
One pint sweet milk, five tablespoons flour, one tablespoon melted butter, six eggs, leaving out the whites of three; bake in buttered cups, half filled, twenty minutes in hot oven.
FOR SAUCE-Beat the whites of five eggs to a stiff froth, and one coffee cup powdered sugar, and the juice of two oranges; turn the pudding from the cups on to a platter; and cover with the sauce just before sending to the table.
A popover-type batter baked in cups, dressed with an uncooked meringue sauce. The batter is sound period technique; the sauce is the problem.
- Why the cautionThe sauce is the beaten whites of five eggs, sugar and orange juice, served without any cooking at all — no heating, no double boiler, no hot syrup poured in. Raw egg white carries a real risk of Salmonella, and neither sugar nor citrus juice reduces it. Use a current recipe for a cooked or pasteurized-white sauce if you want to serve these with a froth.
- Egg arithmeticThe batter calls for six eggs with three whites left out, which leaves three whites in hand. The sauce then asks for five. The original simply does not balance; treat the sauce quantity as written for a larger batch, or as an error.
- "Hot oven"In this period that generally means somewhere around 400-450F. Popover-style batters need the high initial heat to convert the milk to steam and drive the rise.
- The batter is very thinFive tablespoons of flour to a pint of milk and six eggs is far leaner in flour than a modern popover. Expect something closer to a baked custard-crust puff than a hollow shell, and expect it to collapse quickly out of the oven.
- "Buttered cups"China custard cups, gem pans or a modern popover tin. Butter them heavily and fill no more than halfway, as the recipe says — the rise is dramatic and the batter climbs.
- "Coffee cup"In nineteenth-century American books a coffee cup is generally reckoned at about a cup. For a sugar measure in a sauce, exactness is not critical.
- Do not open the ovenTwenty minutes is about right for standard custard cups, but the puffs must set before they meet cooler air. Judge by deep browning through the door.
- YieldA pint of milk and six eggs fills eight to ten custard cups, serving six to eight as a dessert.
"German puffs" in American cookbooks of the 1870s and 80s covers a family of egg-heavy batter puddings baked in individual cups — close cousins of the English Yorkshire pudding and the popover, the name that would come to dominate in American usage. The German attribution is loose; it points generally toward the Continental tradition of Auflauf and baked batter puddings rather than to any single named dish, and such geographic labels in community cookbooks often traveled with a contributor's family rather than with a documented origin. The recipe's credit line, H. M. Brewer, is typical of the charity compilations of the period, gathered from the contributions of local housekeepers; the whole genre depends on the assumption that a reader already knows what a hot oven feels like and how thick a batter should look, which is why the instructions are so brief. The orange-juice froth also marks the period: citrus was a purchasable winter luxury, and a sauce built on it announced a certain standard of table.