Beat 3 eggs with a pinch of salt; add 1 pint of milk and ⅔ of a cup of flour. Stir until smooth. Then pour into a well-greased pan and bake until done. Serve with English roast-beef, and pour over the gravy.
Four lines of instruction with no oven temperature, no pan size and no time, which was normal in 1900 when the pudding went under the roast and came out when the beef did. The ratios are worth reading carefully before you mix.
- The batter is very thinTwo-thirds of a cup of flour to a full pint of milk is roughly half the flour a modern Yorkshire pudding recipe uses; one common modern rule of thumb is equal volumes of egg, milk and flour. As written this bakes into a thin, crisp, custardy sheet rather than a high-walled pudding. Increase the flour to about 1½ cups if you want the tall, hollow version.
- Pint measureAn American pint is 16 fl oz / 2 cups. If you are working from a British reprint of the same period, an imperial pint is 20 fl oz, which makes the batter thinner still.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature at all; "bake until done" assumed a cook who knew her own oven. For a modern one, use a hot oven, 425–450°F: Yorkshire pudding rises on steam and needs that initial blast, and a moderate oven gives a flat, leathery result.
- The fat matters mostThe pan and its grease must be smoking hot before the batter goes in — put the greased pan in the oven for five to ten minutes first. Beef dripping is traditional; a neutral oil with a high smoke point works, butter does not.
- Rest the batterMix it smooth and let it stand 30 minutes to an hour at room temperature; hydrated flour and relaxed gluten are generally held to give a better rise. A cook working to this recipe would have had that time in hand anyway while the beef finished roasting.
- TimingIn a 9x13 pan, 25–30 minutes; in a muffin tin or popover pan, 20–25. Do not open the oven for the first 20 minutes or the pudding collapses.
- YieldA pint of milk makes enough for six to eight as a side, or about twelve individual puddings.
- ServingIn parts of England the pudding was served before the meat, as a filling first course, with the roasting-pan juices spooned over it. Here it goes alongside the beef, with the gravy poured over.
Yorkshire pudding began as a way of catching the fat dripping from a joint turning on a spit: a batter pan set beneath the meat caught what would otherwise be wasted, and the resulting pudding was eaten first, with gravy, so that the more expensive beef went further. Early printed versions appear under the name "dripping pudding" in the mid-eighteenth century, with the Yorkshire attribution generally traced to Hannah Glasse's 1747 cookery book. By the time this collection assigned it to July 7 as the day's English dish, the spit had given way to the closed oven and the pudding was baked in its own greased tin, but the pairing with roast beef and the instruction to flood it with gravy carry the older logic intact. Its appearance in a collection ranging across many national cuisines says something about how firmly one regional batter had come to stand for England as a whole.