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Pop Overs
Mrs. Andrews.
One cup of milk, one cup flour, one egg, beaten separately, Bake in cups, a tablespoon to each cup.
A three-ingredient batter that depends almost entirely on oven heat and vessel choice, neither of which the original bothers to state.
- The hinge: a hot oven, opened as little as possiblePopovers rise on steam, so the oven must be fully preheated. The original states neither temperature nor time; modern practice is roughly 450F to start, dropped to about 350F after the first 15 minutes for a further 15 to 20, with the batter going into hot greased cups. Opening the door early is widely said to collapse them.
- "Beaten separately"In these books this normally means the yolk and white beaten apart, the white added last, though the recipe does not say how far or when. Modern practice usually beats the whole egg into the liquid instead.
- "Bake in cups"At the time this would have meant heavy earthenware or iron gem pans, or individual custard cups. A cast-iron popover or muffin pan is the closest equivalent; heat it in the oven and grease it before the batter goes in.
- "A tablespoon to each cup" is ambiguousOne tablespoon of batter per cup is very little for anything but the smallest gem cups. Read it as filling each cup no more than a third to half full, which is what the batter needs to climb the sides.
- SaltNone is called for. Most later versions include about a quarter teaspoon.
- Flour and consistencyOne cup milk to one cup flour gives a batter about the thickness of heavy cream. Modern all-purpose flour may absorb more liquid than some of the softer household flours of the period, so thin with a spoonful or two of milk if the batter is at all sluggish.
- YieldRoughly six popovers, depending on the size of the cups. Serve immediately; they deflate and toughen soon after leaving the oven.
Popovers are the American descendant of the batter puddings baked under roasting meat in English kitchens, the same family as Yorkshire pudding, cut loose from the dripping pan and baked in individual cups. The name is generally traced to the way the batter pops up over the rim of the cup as it expands, and it appears in American cookbooks under its own name and sometimes as "breakfast puffs." Its place in a book like this one is easy to explain: three ingredients most households already had, no leavening to buy, and a showy result. Recipes here carry a contributor's name because The Home Cook Book was assembled from the receipts of contributing ladies and sold for charity, and Mrs. Andrews's brevity is typical of the genre, which assumed the reader already knew what a hot oven looked like.