No-Fail Popovers

I made a lot of popovers when I was in high school, which might give you the impression that I was a very sophisticated teen. I wasn’t. I made them because the recipe was easy and required only inexpensive pantry ingredients, which made popovers a perfect after-school snack for my siblings and me. I mixed together milk, eggs, flour, and salt; poured the mixture into the wells of a preheated, greased muffin tin (we didn’t have a specialized popover pan); and baked them in a hot oven, turning down the temperature halfway through baking to prevent the outsides from burning while the insides finished cooking. When all went well, the cups of batter ballooned dramatically into crisp, hollow shells with creamy, custardy interior walls, and I felt like I had invented fire.

But it didn’t always go well, even though I always used the same recipe. About 25 percent of the time my popovers were squat and spongy,