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Roast Beef with Pudding
Bake exactly as directed for ordinary roast for the table; then make a Yorkshire pudding, to eat like vegetables with the roast, as follows: For every pint of milk take three eggs, three cups of flour, and a pinch of salt; stir to a smooth batter, and pour into the dripping-pan under the meat, half an hour before it is done. - Mrs. C. T. Carson.
A two-line instruction that assumes you already know how to roast beef and that your oven has a dripping-pan sitting beneath the joint. Both assumptions need translating.
- The batter is thicker than modern practiceA pint of milk to three cups of flour gives a very heavy batter by present standards; modern Yorkshire pudding uses considerably more liquid and egg in proportion to the flour. This version will rise less and eat denser. If you want the tall, hollow pudding, thin it.
- Pint and cupThe book uses the US pint of 16 fl oz and a cup of about 8 fl oz. Eggs of the period were generally smaller than today's large egg, so three may amount to somewhat less volume than three modern ones.
- Getting the fat under the meatThe instruction depends on beef roasted on a rack or spit with a pan below catching drippings. In a modern oven, set the joint on a rack over a shallow metal pan and let the fat collect there for the first hour or more. Cast iron or steel, never glass or ceramic, which will not take the heat shock.
- The fat must be smokingThis is the hinge. Pour the batter into fat that is visibly shimmering and near smoking, or the pudding sits flat and greasy instead of climbing the sides of the pan. If the drippings have cooled while you mixed, return the pan to the oven alone for five minutes first.
- Oven heatYorkshire pudding wants 425-450F. A beef roast finished at 325-350F will not lift it. Either take the meat out to rest and raise the oven for the pudding, or accept a flatter result.
- Half an hour is about rightThirty to thirty-five minutes at high heat sets and browns the pudding. Do not open the oven for the first twenty; the escaping heat collapses it.
- Rest the batterNot in the original, but mixing the batter an hour ahead and letting it stand hydrates the flour and gives a better rise. Stir once before pouring.
- YieldThe recipe is written as a ratio, 'for every pint of milk', so scale to the joint. A single pint-of-milk batch will roughly fill a large rectangular baking pan and feed a table as the accompaniment the recipe intends.
Yorkshire pudding is generally said to have begun as a way of not wasting beef fat: batter cooked in the drippings under a spit-roasted joint caught what would otherwise fall into the fire, and was traditionally served before the meat, with gravy, so that a cheap flour-and-milk dish took the edge off the appetite before the expensive part arrived. Mrs. Carson's note that it is eaten "like vegetables with the roast" shows the American shift away from that older sequence, treating it as a side dish rather than a first course. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, issued in 1877 by the Buckeye Publishing Company in Minneapolis and grown out of the 1876 Centennial Buckeye Cook Book compiled at Marysville, Ohio, is full of this kind of shorthand entry: the assumption is that the reader can already roast beef and needs only the addition. The recipe also quietly records what a kitchen looked like then, since it makes no sense at all without an open dripping-pan sitting beneath the meat.