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Yorkshire Pudding
Beat up four eggs, nine tablespoonfuls of flour, one pint of milk, and half a teaspoonful of salt. Put it in the pan under beef which is being roasted. Bake half an hour. Serve with the beef.
A four-line recipe that assumes a joint of beef turning above the pan and a cook who already knows what the batter should look like. The proportions are sound; almost everything else needs translating.
- The hinge: the fat must be smokingThe original gets its lift from a pan already blazing hot with beef drippings. If you are not roasting a joint above it, preheat a metal pan with 2-3 tablespoons of beef fat or a neutral high-heat oil at 450F until it shimmers and smokes, then pour the batter in and return it immediately. Batter into lukewarm fat gives a dense pancake.
- Nine tablespoonfuls of flourA little over 1/2 cup, or roughly 2 1/2 oz. This is a deliberately thin batter, closer to crepe consistency than to American popover batter, which is why it spreads and crisps in a wide pan rather than doming.
- A pintIn an American book of this period, 2 cups. If you are following an English source of the same era the pint is 20 fl oz, which makes a noticeably slacker batter.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given because the pudding simply went into whatever oven was roasting the beef. Bake at 450F for the first 15 minutes, then drop to 400F for the remainder. Half an hour is right for a shallow pan; a deeper one needs 35-40 minutes.
- Rest the batterNot stated in the original. Modern practice is to beat until smooth, then leave it 30 minutes to an hour so the flour hydrates and the bubbles settle; the pudding rises higher and tastes less pasty.
- Do not open the ovenThe structure is steam held in a setting egg-and-flour shell. Opening the door in the first 20 minutes collapses it, and it will not come back up.
- If you are catching drippingsPosition the pan under the joint for the last half hour of roasting, and expect the pudding to be soft and savory on top where the juices land rather than uniformly crisp. That was the point of the dish.
- YieldEnough for 6 to 8 as a side, baked in a 9x13-inch pan. The same batter makes about 12 individual puddings in a muffin tin, which need only 20-25 minutes.
Yorkshire pudding began as a way of not wasting fat. A batter set beneath the spit caught the drippings from the roasting joint, and it is often said that in poorer households it was eaten first, with gravy, so that less meat would be needed to fill the table. Hannah Glasse gave it under the name "Yorkshire pudding" in 1747, the dish having appeared earlier as "dripping pudding"; the reason for the regional label is not documented. By the time this book was printed the dish was well established in American cookery as a companion to roast beef.