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Breakfast Puffs
Four eggs, four cupfuls milk, four cups flour. Beat milk, yolks of eggs and flour together; add the whites beaten stiff. Bake in quick oven, in gem irons.
This is a popover batter under an older name, and it behaves like one: the puff comes from steam, so heat and a full pan matter more than technique.
- Quick ovenRead that as roughly 425-450F. The recipe gives no timing; a common modern approach is to hold that heat to force the rise, then drop to about 350F to dry the shells so they do not collapse.
- Gem ironsHeavy cast-iron gem pans, the ancestor of the muffin tin. A standard muffin pan or a deep popover pan works; grease it well and preheat it in the oven so the batter hits hot metal.
- YieldFour cups each of milk and flour with four eggs is a very large batch — two dozen or more puffs, depending on the size of the cups. Halving or quartering it is sensible for a modern household.
- No salt is listedNineteenth-century bread recipes often assumed it. About a teaspoon of salt per four cups of flour keeps the puffs from tasting flat.
- Beating the whitesSeparating and folding in stiff whites was a common handling in batters of this period. It is not strictly necessary — whole eggs beaten into the batter will still give the rise, which comes from steam — though folded whites may produce a slightly lighter interior.
- Batter consistencyEqual volumes of milk and flour give something like thin cream. Beat until smooth, then let it rest 20-30 minutes if you have time; hydrated flour and relaxed gluten puff higher.
- Do not open the ovenPopovers set their shell late, and opening the oven early is widely blamed for deflated puffs. Leave them alone until they are well risen and browned.
- ServingThey are best within minutes of coming out, split and buttered. Reheated puffs go leathery.
"Gem" was the American name for the small cast-iron cup pans that came into wide household use in the second half of the nineteenth century, and any batter baked in them tended to be called gems or puffs. The formula here — equal milk and flour, an egg per cupful, no chemical leavening beyond the stiffly beaten whites — is the same one that produces Yorkshire pudding when poured into beef drippings and popovers when baked in individual cups; the American name popover is generally traced to the idea of the batter rising up and over the rim of its tin. For a cook without dependable baking powder or time to raise a yeast dough, a batter that leavened itself with steam was the fastest hot bread on the breakfast table.