Home › A Calendar of Dinners › July 21
July 21
Menu: Strawberry Cocktails; Macaroni Cutlets, Cheese Sauce; Popovers; Tomato Mayonnaise; Pimiento Sandwiches; Frozen Banana Whip; Coffee; Pop Overs-Beat up 3 eggs until; light; add 1 cup milk and 1 teaspoon; melted Crisco. Pour this gradually; into 1 cup flour and 1/2 teaspoon salt,; beating all the time until smooth.; Crisco iron gem pans, put them in the; oven, and when hot, take them out; and fill them half full of this batter.; Put them back in the oven and bake; for 45 minutes. They should be at; least 4 times their original bulk. If; they fall, they are not thoroughly; done. The oven should be hot.
A standard popover batter, thin as heavy cream, relying on steam rather than any leavener. The recipe is workable as written once the vague oven direction is pinned to a number.
- "The oven should be hot"In period terms a hot oven corresponds to roughly 425-450F. Popovers need that heat for the first stretch so the water in the batter flashes to steam and inflates the shell; a common modern practice is to drop to 350F for the last third to dry the walls without scorching.
- Forty-five minutesLong by modern practice for small pans. Figure 20 minutes at 425F, then 15-20 minutes at 350F. The warning about falling is sound: the crust must be firm and deep brown before they come out, so judge by color and rigidity, not the clock.
- Iron gem pansCast-iron muffin pans, in use from the mid-nineteenth century onward, with deep, rounded cups. A modern popover pan or a heavy muffin tin does the same job; cast iron is worth using because the retained heat is what starts the rise.
- "Crisco iron gem pans"Used as a verb: grease them. Preheating the greased pan, as directed, is the hinge of the recipe -- batter poured into a cold pan will not climb.
- Don't open the doorThe book does not mention this. Opening the oven in the first 20 minutes collapses the steam pocket and you get the fallen, doughy result the recipe warns against.
- Batter consistencyAdding the liquid gradually to the flour, as written, prevents lumps; the finished batter should pour like thin cream. Resting it 20-30 minutes at room temperature gives a slightly better rise, though the original does not ask for it.
- YieldAbout 8 to 10 popovers in standard muffin cups, or 6 in a deep popover pan. Serve immediately -- they deflate and soften within minutes of leaving the oven.
Popovers are often said to be the American descendant of Yorkshire pudding, the same eggs-milk-flour batter baked in individual cups rather than under a joint of beef, and the name is generally traced to the way the batter pops up over the rim of the pan. This version comes from a Procter & Gamble promotional cookbook built around Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced in 1911, and the wording shows the book's whole purpose: the fat is not merely an ingredient but a verb, and a recipe that in older collections would have called for butter or beef drippings has been quietly rewritten around the new product. The "Calendar of Dinners" section that houses it assigned a full menu to each day of the year, a common device of the period for selling a pantry staple by making it indispensable to a household's routine.