Milk Street's My Family Recipe

CHRISTOPHER KIMBALL: Welcome to Milk Street's My Family Recipe.

We help home cooks rediscover and recreate lost family recipes.

- My grandmother Margaret's was the absolute best.

- Don't put any pressure on us or anything!

CHRISTOPHER: We bring home cooks to our Boston studio...

I'm gonna stand back.

...where, along with our host and pastry chef Cheryl Day... - Isn't it great how food can take you back?

CHRISTOPHER: ...we teach them how to make their family recipe from scratch.

- You're gonna be able to bake this cake.

- I can do it.

CHRISTOPHER: Just the way it was made by, say, their grandmother.

- Beautiful!

- Grandma would not tolerate lumps.

CHRISTOPHER: Then we send them home to recreate that recipe for the toughest audience... - There it is.

CHRISTOPHER: ...their own family.

[laughing] CHRISTOPHER: Can our home cooks pull it off?

- Mom, that's really good.

- I think that's a yes.

CHRISTOPHER: Or will the recipe be lost forever?

Right here on Milk Street's My Family Recipe.

- That is delicious.

[upbeat music playing] Funding for this series was provided by the following.

Mowi Salmon comes ready to cook.

Ready to grill, ready to season, or pre-seasoned and ready to eat.

In an assortment of flavors for an assortment of people.

Mowi Salmon.

- My name is Jessica Costantini.

I am from Toronto, Ohio.

We're about 30 minutes outside of Pittsburgh, right along the Ohio River.

It's a quiet, little, sleepy town.

We're a very family-oriented community.

I've lived in Toronto for about 22 years.

My husband and my niece live here with me in Toronto.

I cook every day for them.

My grandmother, Melva Yost, was a nurse at the local hospital.

She married my grandfather shortly after he came home from Korea.

She didn't have the means to care for all of her kids on just a mill worker and nurse's salary.

My grandmother cooked with chuck roast.

She didn't cook with fancy meats.

Generally, it was canned goods.

She could take very few ingredients and create a very luscious Christmas dinner.

Christmastime at my grandmother's was full of family and friends.

If you could get through her dining room, through the wrapping paper, you would eat pies, cookies, cakes.

As a child, I remember having her Christmas popover.

My grandmother's Christmas popovers were always buttery and savory and be able to pull apart with your fingers.

And when I try to recreate these popovers...

This looks runny and lumpy.

Major problems.

All right, let's get the muffin tins out.

I think I'm a pretty good cook.

I was told to heat the pan, pouring the batter inside.

Didn't matter what oven temperature I set it at.

Oh, no.

Mine were dry, crumbly, with a doughy middle, and didn't have the buttery texture that my grandmother's did at Christmastime.

It means a lot to me to get this recipe right, because this is a Christmas memory.

It is a memory that I would like to hand down to my nieces.

It's a memory that I would like to give to my husband, who didn't get to experience this himself.

So, I'm about to get on this call with Chris and Cheryl.

I'm excited that they're gonna help.

I need this to be the perfect Christmas memory that I can recreate with my family.

- Hi, Jessica!

How are you?

- Wonderful.

How are you two?

- We're very excited to try popovers, but we've never tried it with this amazing-sounding sauce.

Can you tell us a little bit about the history of that in your family?

- I'm Italian and British.

It was always told to me that my father's food was culinarily superior to my mother's food.

My mother's food was just honky-tonk farm food.

- Tell us how you really think.

- I wanted to learn how to make these old British recipes or this farm food that my grandmother had served me as a child, and I realized very quickly how difficult those popovers were, and it was epic fail every single time that I tried to make it for the family.

- Oh no!

- My grandmother would make these popovers for Christmas.

They would be served with either creamed chipped beef, creamed chicken in the springtime with peas, carrots, things like that, or she would slit the inside open and pour that sauce or the creamed chipped beef down into the center.

- Did she actually use chipped beef or did she make, like, a beef stew?

- It just depended on what she had available.

At Christmas, she would have used, like, a ground chuck.

Everything came out of this woman's garden.

- So she made everything from scratch.

I love that.

Tell us, who are you most excited to share it with?

- Probably my niece.

So, I do want to hand these over to her.

I can't wait to make them this Christmas.

To have that memory and make them at Christmastime would be great.

- I think it's so special you're taking the time to share a part of your family history.

- I'm excited to meet you and cook with you.

- Thank you so much.

Well, we're excited to have you.

- That's amazing.

I can't wait.

- Bye, Jessica.

Looking forward - Bye, Jessica.

- to seeing you.

- Bye.

- I've done a lot of testing and popovers over the years, but I've never had filled popovers.

- They're so simple, they're not.

- That's it.

So, a lot of people will tell you that popovers are uniquely American, that they have nothing to do with Yorkshire pudding, but, in fact, the batters are very similar.

One is baked in a popover pan, the other is baked in a casserole.

One of the, uh, trademarks of either of these recipes is there's no leavening.

It's flour, eggs, milk, salt and butter.

And in the magic of the oven and the steam, they rise right up.

They're supposed to be really crisp on the outside, but the trick is that they're also soft and pillowy on the inside.

You need both of those textures.

We've researched this, and many popovers are filled with scrambled eggs, with stew, with custard, with seafood.

So, the challenge is to get a popover that's gonna work.

It's crispy on the outside, creamy on the inside, to get a great beef filling that's at least as good as the one that Jessica's grandmother made at home.

- All right, let's see.

So, popovers-- not something we typically work on here at Milk Street, but we're up for the challenge.

Uh, a lot of variables here.

The pan you use, the temperature of the oven, the batter itself.

So, I'm gonna give these a trial run first and see where we are.

So, the perfect popover is a combination of nice, crispy crust around the outside, but soft and baked through, but not dry in the middle.

All right, babies, in you go.

The time, the temperature and the pan are key.

Hm So, the first batch I made here-- not great.

They didn't puff up enough and they're too dry on the outside and they're dry on the inside.

Not pleasant.

So, this is a little frustrating.

My results are not so great, so I'm gonna ask Diane to step in here and help me out.

So, the first point of attack here is the batter itself.

We tried a lot of different versions with different dairy products, and Diane landed on low-fat milk.

This makes the nicest, puffiest popover.

One other key tip here: you've got to let popover batter rest.

It helps the rise, it helps it make nice, even and golden brown when they bake.

If you're gonna bake popovers in a muffin tin, don't use a nonstick pan.

The batter needs something to grab onto and climb up.

Nonstick pans are too slippery and they're just gonna collapse.

So, finally-- Diane's brilliant idea-- pierce them once with a skewer at the very end of baking and pop them back in the oven for a second.

It will dry out the interior and make them nice and sturdy and crisp.

This recipe is a lot more than just popovers.

Jessica's grandmother used to make a delicious beef gravy with whatever she had on hand.

So we did a really basic milk flour bchamel gravy base and used beef juices from some braised beef chuck to add to some richness there.

This is so good.

So, after all this work here, we have mastered the popover, but can Jessica?

- Hi, Jessica.

- Hi, Cheryl.

- We are so excited to make your Christmas popovers.

- Yes, they are a huge holiday memory in my house.

This was an inexpensive Christmas dinner that was very decadent and had an unctuous beef stew.

- She's secretly a food writer.

- Maybe.

- "Unctuous" is definitely... it's one of those words.

- She's unctuous.

- So, we're gonna start with the beef.

We actually started with a, uh, chuck.

We caramelized some onions, put a couple tablespoons of tomato paste.

You cook that down, saut that, that gives it more, umami or more beefy flavor.

- Oh, that sounds good.

- And so this is cooked until really tender.

I'm gonna take the beef out, I'm gonna shred it.

- So, I'm gonna start with the popover batter.

All you do is you're gonna whisk your eggs, and then we're gonna add the milk.

And really, the secret, Jessica, to this is once we get it mixed, we're going to let it rest.

It's gonna look and feel a little bit different by the time it rests.

- After about...

Okay, gotcha.

- So we're gonna add a little bit of salt, and then that's our flour.

- We used a little more flour than some recipes, just to give it more structure so it didn't collapse.

- 'Cause right now this is what I get.

It makes sense that that's the trick to this.

By letting the flour rehydrate, it was creating a thick, creamier batter that would make a fluffier popover.

- So, now that it's rested, I'm gonna just give it a good stir.

And then we have our muffin tins greased and floured.

And here's another great tip.

If you're using a muffin tin, you're gonna keep these two in the center without being greased.

- Your technique is leaving the two empty - Right.

- so that they can pop over more evenly.

- So now we're gonna fill, like, three-quarters full.

- Really?

- Yes.

What did you do?

- Okay.

I was doing half full so that they wouldn't all turn into one giant blob.

Being on the set with Chris and Cheryl, I learned so much.

- Now we're gonna pop these into our preheated oven, 400 degrees, about 45 minutes.

And you're gonna get that... poof-poof!

Yeah.

- What was that?

Is she making train noises?

- All right, so now we're gonna make the gravy, the famous gravy.

So, we're gonna start with butter.

Get that melted into the pan.

So, the key here, you want to make sure that you've got this smooth and you don't have a lumpy gravy.

- Mm-hmm.

Let me look.

- I'm gonna get you to add in the milk.

You got it.

We're gonna pop those in.

Go ahead.

- Beautiful.

- We don't want lumps.

Grandma would not tolerate lumps.

- I love it.

- A lumpy gravy.

No.

I'm assuming we're gonna thicken it to the point where it coats the back of the spoon.

- All right, I'll be right back.

- So, Cheryl and I are out of a job right now, clearly.

That's... that's okay.

- Yes?

- Absolutely.

- What am I doing?

- Here you go.

- Yeah, I could tell you've made a gravy a time or two.

- Yes, a few times.

Need a little bit extra pepper.

- Yeah.

I like a lot of pepper.

- Yeah, I like a lot of pepper with my milk gravy.

- Yeah, we're gonna add a little bit of the dripping.

- Using bay leaves and the beef drippings... - Keep stirring.

- Yup.

...created a rich, wonderful sauce that I would have never been able to recreate at my home.

- And then we're gonna add the meat.

- Oh, that looks delicious.

- I can't wait to eat these.

Jessica, we are ready to fill them.

- Oh, those look beautiful.

They look just like my grandmother's.

- Aren't they gorgeous?

- So, Chris and Cheryl pull out perfect popovers.

It is buttery.

It is fluffy inside.

It has the perfect exterior.

- You do the honors, Chris.

- So excited to be able to taste it.

- You tell me how much gravy.

- Oh, gravy me up.

- Oh, good.

"Gravy me up."

Okay.

- Oh, I'm so excited.

- How's that?

That gravy... - That looks amazing!

- Want me to gravy you up?

- Gravy me up.

You want some chives on top?

- Please.

- Okay.

Are you ready?

- Yes.

- Let's see if we achieved Grandma's Christmas popovers.

- Big piece of beef and the popover.

Okay.

Mmm.

Mmm.

Yeah.

It tastes like Christmas.

I take a bite, and this popover has everything that I wanted.

They're perfect.

They were buttery, they were airy.

They had everything that I could remember as a young child.

- Brings all the memories flooding back?

- It does.

The chunky beef in the middle, like, that milk gravy.

- So, just thinking about how you've recreated this, how do you think Grandma would feel about that?

- I think it would be...

I'm sorry.

I think she would be very proud.

That was overwhelming for me, that the research team and Chris and Cheryl took the time and recreated such an amazing Christmas memory for me.

- So, I just want to say that, uh, we were sitting in the driver's seat, in the passenger seat, and you were supposed to be in the back.

You came in here, you grabbed the steering wheel.

- Right.

- You obviously know a lot about cooking, so I don't think we have a lot of concerns.

- No, not at all.

- I think-I think you've already figured this out.

Yeah.

- Just to get this crispy crust, I'll be impressed, but I'll follow the recipe and I'll see what I can do.

- Well...

I have a lot to live up to.

- Thank you for all your time and effort to have me here.

Thank you.

- It's been our pleasure.

- Our pleasure.

- It was overwhelming to realize all of the things that Cheryl and Chris showed me must have just been inside my grandmother's head.

Turn that down a little bit.

Get these softened.

Today I have a large group of family and friends coming over to try these popovers.

All right, now let's get the chuck roast cut up.

Family members with very high expectations.

Ooh, it's smelling good.

I'm gonna save those little bits for later.

Some fresh-cracked pepper.

They're looking good.

Just need a couple tablespoons.

The tomato paste was a game changer.

The beef is one and a half inch pieces.

It created a beautiful gravy over the beef for it to braise into.

See you in a bit.

I'm gonna look at the recipe.

Forget what I got to put in here next.

Okay.

All right, I need to grease these muffin tins.

Trick to this is to leave the center ones open.

Maybe this time they won't burn.

The timing on these popovers has to be perfect.

All right, let's get this in.

If I don't get the timing correct, I will have a giant pot of milk beef gravy with nothing to serve my family and friends.

In we go.

And now all we have to do is put these in the oven.

I'm excited to see how they come out.

Let's get the sauce started.

This wasn't expensive food.

Four tablespoons of butter.

It was food that you could create with very minimal money on a steel worker's salary for a Christmas meal.

I'm excited to see how this came out.

Ah, I always think onions smell like my grandma's kitchen.

People in this area would give you the shirt off their back and the-they would give you a meal.

You know, and-and this is one of those meals that Melva would walk over to the neighbor's to make sure that they were provided for on Christmas.

She would have taken her pies and cookies to work to make sure that her patients even had a hot holiday meal.

She did it all out of the kindness of her heart.

She did it all out of, you know, just out of pure love.

All right, time to pull out the bay leaf.

Her recipes took great technique.

Get rid of that.

I had no idea that it was gonna take this much time to cook these simple recipes.

Let's look.

I open the oven door.

They did not pop over.

But I think I needed to add more batter.

Cheryl said to bring them out and poke a hole in the middle, but I don't think at this point that's gonna matter.

They're done.

These popovers are burnt on the outside... - Come on.

- We got kids.

...doughy in the middle.

And I'm trying to recreate this perfect Christmas memory for my family.

- That's a pretty flower you got there, kiddo.

- Thank you, baby.

I got you a yellow chair, so you can sit in the yellow chair.

Jess, you want to sit down here?

- My wife is a phenomenal cook.

- Are you ready for some popovers?

- But she doesn't really bake too much, so...

I've been hearing about these popovers for, well, since we've gotten together.

And she always talked about how good they were and whatnot.

She said she's never been able to perfect this recipe, so she's definitely wanted to work on it, try to make it better.

- Today is a really big day for her.

She has been talking about this for weeks now, and she's so excited to create this dish for our little family.

Ready to eat?

- Yeah.

- All right.

- I mean, they look buttery and they look good, but I don't think that they cooked in the middle all the way.

So, my popovers didn't pop over.

Coats the back of the spoon.

Mm.

Perfect.

But the gravy was what I really enjoyed, and that's spot-on.

Super excited to have everybody here.

I am most excited to share this with my beautiful niece, Lia.

- I haven't really gotten to try it that much, and I'm really excited to see her take on it and see her make it and improve it.

- See, Rachael Ray ain't got nothing on me.

- Her grandmother was elderly whenever we started dating, so we never had the chance to have them with her grandmother cooking.

- All right, popovers.

That did not pop over, but that's okay.

The gravy looks amazing.

- It smells so good.

- Green beans.

- And I came hungry.

Do you want to try one?

Okay.

What we're gonna do is we're gonna open 'em up a little bit and then we pour the gravy over them.

This is a memory that I had from my grandmother at Christmastime that I just wanted to share with everybody.

And I hope you like it.

Is it good?

All right.

- They're really good.

- Here's for me.

Melva would think it was probably funny that these didn't come out, and she would tell me that I have a lot to learn from her still.

There, I'm not gonna put that much green stuff on Eleanor's.

Whether or not they popped over doesn't matter.

I still get to have a nice evening with my family and friends and remember Melva in this way.

And I'll get it right eventually.

Jim, you want one?

- I still see layers and holes and pockets.

- Yeah, they do have that airy interior that I wanted.

How is it?

- Very good.

I love the fact that she's going through her grandmother's old recipes and learning about her family, uh, through the cooking.

- They didn't pop over, but they taste really good.

- Don't worry, Aunt Jeeg, we will get these to pop over next time whenever I'm in the kitchen with you.

Also, FYI, I'm taking this with me.

- The gravy is like... - It is really good.

- It is really good.

- Grandma would be happy?

- Absolutely.

Melva would think this was amazing, that her family could sit down at a table and remember a simpler time where flour, eggs, milk, and butter could create a memory that was lasting for everyone involved.

My grandmother's been gone since I was 17 or 18 years old.

I never asked my grandmother how to make her cookies.

I never asked her how to make her pies.

I never asked her how to make these popovers.

At the time, it wasn't important to me.

And I think, now, I should have asked.

We are losing a generation of people who know these techniques and know how to make these foods.

These recipes need to be handed on for their legacy.

- So everyone's wrong about how to make caramel sauce.

And when I say caramel, this is what I mean: it's pourable, it's not too dark, it's dark, but not too dark.

You want it dark enough so it's not too sweet.

It has a little bit of bittersweet to it.

So you have to get the sugar melted to just the right point, and that's where people go wrong.

Most recipes say two things: they say start with sugar and water, and they say use a saucepan.

We're going to do neither of those things.

We're going to start with just sugar, no water.

So the other thing we're not doing is we're not using a saucepan.

Now, a saucepan tends to be narrow, you look down into it, it's hard to see changes, it's hard to see color, especially when it starts to bubble up.

A skillet has a much wider surface area.

It's going to be a thinner layer of sugar or caramel, so you can really see what's going on.

The other thing is, you can just take this off the heat, like this, to slow down cooking and put it back.

It's a great way of controlling the cooking speed.

So now we're going to melt the sugar in the skillet.

It'll start to melt around the outside first.

We'll start to stir, and we'll get it to just the right point for maximum flavor.

All right, so when it starts to melt, you want to start using a heat-proof spatula.

So now the sugar is really dissolved.

And this is the hard part, this is the hard part.

It's like, "do you feel lucky," right?

You want to get it a nice, rich caramel color, mahogany color, but you don't want to overdo it, because if it's not cooked enough, it's just going to be sweet.

You want it to be a little bittersweet, right?

You want bitter with the sweet.

Okay, now we're going to take this off the heat.

We're going to add the cream, and this is going to bubble up.

(pan sizzles) And this also, you can tell, it's going to get thick, and... sort of like candy, right?

So now, I put it back on the heat, sort of a medium to medium-high, and this is now going to go from sort of a candy; it's going to melt back into a nice sauce.

So, at this point, I'm just using medium heat just to finish melting that mixture.

Now, you can also tell, if this were in a saucepan, it would be about this thick, and all you'd see is the bubbles on top, and you wouldn't really be able to see the color of the caramel underneath.

And that's really one of the problems with making caramel sauces and melting sugar.

There's a lot of froth, a lot of bubbles, but you can't see underneath it.

In a skillet, obviously, it's a very thin layer, so as I drag the spatula through it, I can see exactly what's going on, so I know I'm not overcooking it.

It's got a nice, rich mahogany color, it's not burned, it's not too dark.

Turn off the heat.

And now we have two last ingredients to add: we have two tablespoons of butter, and we have a teaspoon of vanilla.

So we'll just let the butter finish melting.

Smells-- the vanilla, you know, it starts to really smell like caramel, and that sort of bittersweet flavor of the melted sugar, caramelized sugar.

There we are.

So let's just pour it out into the bowl.

So that's it, that's our caramel from a skillet.

No water with the sugar, just sugar.

We can watch it cook, so we get it cooked to exactly the right amount, we add the cream, stir that in.

Again, you watch the color as you cook, add a little bit of butter and vanilla.

So it's very simple to do, it's ten minutes in a skillet, and you have total control over the cooking method the entire time.

Recipes and episodes from this season of My Family Recipe are available at MilkStreetTV.com/MFR Access our content any time to change the way you cook.

Funding for this series was provided by the following.

Mowi Salmon comes ready to cook.

Ready to grill, ready to season, or pre-seasoned and ready to eat.

In an assortment of flavors for an assortment of people.

Mowi Salmon.