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Dessert

Pop Overs

Popovers are airy, baked bread-like cakes made from a batter of rye and wheat flour, eggs, milk, sugar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Rye and wheat match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 404 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pop Overs

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine rye flour, wheat flour, sugar, and salt.

  2. Beat the eggs until very light, then add the milk.

  3. Pour three‑quarters of the egg and milk mixture into the bowl and beat well.

  4. Add the remaining egg and milk mixture and mix until combined.

Bake

  1. Butter twelve small stone molds and place them in a baking pan.

  2. Bake in a very hot oven at 400 °F (200 °C) for the first 30 minutes.

  3. Reduce the temperature to 350 °F (175 °C) and bake for an additional 30 minutes.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Rye + wheattop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together404 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Wheat + milktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Rye + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,320 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + wheattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Provide structure and lift as their proteins set around the steam during baking.
Milk
Supplies liquid that turns to steam, helping the batter puff and giving a tender interior.
Rye flour
Adds flavor and a lighter structure, while gluten from the wheat flour gives the batter its main framework.
Wheat flour
Its gluten forms the network that holds the rising batter in shape.

The step that matters

Beat the batter well and keep the oven hot at the start. Beating develops gluten so the batter can stretch, and a very hot oven makes the steam expand quickly before the set structure forms. Opening the oven early or a weak oven causes popovers to collapse.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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