Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Pop Overs (III)
Pop Overs (III)
Mrs. King.
Three cups of milk, three cups flour, three eggs, a little salt, one tablespoon melted butter put in the last thing; two tablespoons to a puff.
A bare-bones popover formula of the kind that assumes the cook already knows the method. Everything hinges on a thin, well-beaten batter and a fiercely hot, greased pan.
- The hinge: heat the panPopovers rise on steam, so the batter must hit metal that is already very hot and well greased. Mrs. King says nothing about this because it was assumed; a cold pan gives you flat, eggy pucks.
- No oven temperature is givenRecipes of this kind rely on a hot or quick oven, which modern popover and Yorkshire pudding directions usually render as roughly 425-450F, some starting high and dropping to about 350F to set the shell.
- "Two tablespoons to a puff"That reads as the fill per cup, not a total. Three cups each of milk and flour plus three eggs makes roughly six cups of batter, which at two tablespoons a cup would fill four dozen small gem pans. A standard 12-cup muffin tin filled about half full holds only around half that batter, so halve the recipe unless you are cooking for a crowd.
- Cups and eggsA nineteenth-century cup is usually near enough 8 fl oz to use directly, though period measures varied; eggs of the period are generally reckoned to have run smaller than a modern large, so three modern large eggs give a slightly richer, eggier batter than the original.
- The butter goes in lastMrs. King has the melted butter stirred in at the end, after the flour and milk are smooth; fat worked in earlier coats the flour and shortens the gluten, and the structure of the risen shell depends on that gluten along with the egg and steam.
- Beat and restBeat until the batter is the consistency of thin cream with no lumps, then let it stand 20-30 minutes if you have time. Resting relaxes the batter and gives a taller rise.
- Do not open the ovenPopovers can collapse if the oven is opened before the shells have set. Pierce each one with a knife tip when they come out to let the steam escape if you want them to stay crisp.
Popovers are generally taken to be an American descendant of Yorkshire pudding, made in individual cups rather than in a pan of roast drippings, and the name is traditionally explained by the way the batter pops over the rim of its tin as it inflates. They appear in American cookbooks from the later nineteenth century onward, and batter puffs of this kind were often baked in cast-iron gem pans; the word "puff" survives here in Mrs. King's instruction. The Home Cook Book was compiled from contributions credited to named local women, and three separate popover recipes sit side by side in it, each slightly different and each credited; the collection is a record of what particular households did rather than a single authority's ruling on the matter.