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Pop Overs (Two eggs two cupfuls of cold)
Two eggs, two cupfuls of cold water, one teaspoonful salt, flour enough to make them thick as griddle cakes. Use an iron gem pan, and have it smoking hot. Have quite a hot oven.
A batter recipe of the barest kind: eggs, water, salt and enough flour to pour. The rise comes entirely from steam, so the heat of the pan and the oven does all the work the recipe declines to explain.
- The hinge: a smoking-hot panThe iron pan must be preheated until it is, as the recipe says, smoking hot, and the batter poured in and returned to the heat immediately. Batter meeting a cold tin gives dense, flat cakes rather than hollow shells.
- "Quite a hot oven"Read this as roughly 425-450F. Some modern cooks drop to 350F for the last ten minutes to dry the interior; a wood or coal oven would in any case have been falling in temperature over the course of the bake.
- Iron gem panA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin tin with deep, rounded cups. A modern popover pan or a cast-iron muffin tin is the closest thing; a thin steel cupcake tin will work but rises less dramatically.
- "Flour enough"Griddle-cake consistency here suggests something in the region of 1 1/2 to 2 cups of all-purpose flour to the two cups of water and two eggs. Add it gradually and stop while the batter still pours.
- Water, not milkWater gives a batter that tends to puff high and bake crisp and dry; milk, used in many other popover recipes, gives a softer, more custardy interior, though it is not what this recipe calls for.
- Beat, then restBeat until entirely smooth -- lumps become tunnels of raw flour -- then let the batter stand 20 to 30 minutes so the flour hydrates. Note that the recipe specifies cold water.
- Do not open the ovenBake 20 minutes without opening the door, then check. Opening early collapses the steam-inflated shell before the walls have set.
- YieldAbout 10 to 12 popovers in standard muffin cups, or 6 to 8 in deep popover cups. Serve immediately; they deflate within minutes of leaving the oven.
Popovers are the American descendant of English batter puddings — the same eggs-flour-liquid mixture that, cooked under a joint of beef, becomes Yorkshire pudding. The name is generally traced to the way the batter pops over the rim of its cup as it inflates, and it appears in American cookbooks often alongside "gems," the plain quick breads baked in the same heavy iron pans. Their place in the bread chapter rather than among desserts is telling: in a period household these were an everyday hot bread for breakfast or tea, made from pantry staples with no yeast, no soda and no waiting, baked in a cast-iron gem pan.