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Pop-Overs
cup milk 2 eggs teaspoon melted shortening Mix salt and flour, add the milk; beat until smooth. Add remaining of milk, well-beaten eggs and shortening. Beat two minutes with eggbeater. Turn into hot greased iron gem pans, and bake about 35 minutes in a hot oven 500°F. until they pop. Then reduce the temperature to 350°F. Creamed meat or vegetables may be served in pop-over cases; or prune whip, blanc mange or chocolate cream filling may be served in the pop-over cases.
The transcription has lost most of its quantities — flour and salt are named but never measured, and the milk is given as a partial figure that is then divided again. Standard popover proportions from books of this era run 1 cup flour, 1 cup milk, 2 eggs, 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1 teaspoon melted fat, which is what the method here describes.
- Missing measurementsThe flour and salt amounts are absent from the original text, and "cup milk" may have been 1 cup or a fraction of one. Do not guess at the flour by feel; the batter should pour like heavy cream, no thicker.
- The two-stage mixingAdding only part of the milk first lets you beat out lumps in a thick paste, which is far easier than chasing them through thin batter. Then thin with the rest, add eggs and fat, and beat two minutes.
- Gem pansAn iron gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin pan; cup shapes varied, some deep, some shallow and oval. A cast-iron popover pan or a standard metal muffin tin works; metal is preferable to silicone, which holds less heat to drive the initial rise.
- Preheat the pan"Hot greased iron gem pans" is the hinge. The pan goes into the oven empty until the fat shimmers, and the batter hits hot metal — that flash of steam is what lifts the shell. Filling cold cups gives dense muffins.
- The temperature dropThe original reads oddly: 35 minutes at 500°F, then reduce. Read it as 15 minutes at 450–500°F until fully risen and set, then 350°F for another 15–20 minutes to dry the interior. Total time around 35 minutes.
- Do not open the ovenPopovers may collapse if the oven door is opened during the high-heat stage. Judge the rise without opening it if you can.
- Yield and servingThis proportion fills six to eight cups. If using them as cases, slit the tops as they come out to let steam escape, or the walls go soft before you can fill them.
- The suggested fillingsBlanc mange is a milk pudding, in American books of this period usually thickened with cornstarch; prune whip is stewed prunes folded into beaten egg white, sometimes served cold and sometimes baked. If the filling is cold and moist, the shells need to be fully dried out in the second stage or they will slump.
A popover is often said to be the American descendant of the same batter that becomes Yorkshire pudding in England — flour, milk and eggs in roughly equal volume, raised by nothing but steam. The name is generally traced to the mid-nineteenth century and, by tradition, to the way the batter climbs and pops over the rim of the pan; New England cookbooks appear to have been printing it by the 1870s. The note that the shells can hold creamed meat one night and chocolate cream the next suggests that one basic batter could serve as both entrée and dessert.