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Yorkshire Pudding (to be Eaten with Roast Beef)
1 pint milk; 4 eggs; 1 scant cupful flour; 1/2 teaspoonful salt. Beat the egg yolks and whites separately. To the well-beaten yolks add the milk and salt, and gradually add the flour, beating until smooth; then beat in the stiffly whipped whites of eggs. The pudding should be made when the meat is within twenty minutes of being done. Raise the meat a couple of inches from the bottom of the pan, if it is roasting without a rack. It can be held in position by running two long wire skewers into each side of the joint and letting the ends rest on the sides of the roasting-pan. Pour the batter under and around the roast, return at once to the oven, and bake twenty-five minutes. Or bake in a separate pan well-buttered, and cut in squares to serve.
A classic drippings pudding, written for a cook roasting beef in an open pan. The batter is thin by modern standards and depends entirely on fierce heat for its rise.
- The hingeThe fat under the batter must be smoking hot before the batter touches it. Poured into cool drippings, the pudding sets flat and greasy instead of climbing.
- Oven heatThe recipe names no temperature, assuming the roast's own oven. Twenty-five minutes implies a hot oven; modern versions of this pudding are generally baked around 425-450F. If your beef is finishing at a low temperature, consider cooking the pudding separately in a hot oven rather than trying to do both.
- Timing versus the roastTwenty minutes of resting is now standard for a roast, so bake the pudding while the beef rests. This suits the separate-pan method better than the under-the-joint method.
- QuantitiesA pint of milk is 2 cups. A "scant cupful" of flour is a little under 1 cup, roughly 4 oz by weight -- giving a very thin batter, much looser than most modern Yorkshire pudding batters.
- Separating the eggsBeating the whites stiff and folding them in is one period approach to lift, though many recipes of the era simply beat the eggs whole. Modern practice usually whisks everything together and rests the batter 30 minutes or more; both work, but the whipped-white version must go into the oven immediately.
- The separate pan"Well-buttered" is the weak point, as butter scorches at the heat this pudding wants. Use a few tablespoons of the drippings, or a high-smoke-point fat, preheated in the pan until it shimmers.
- YieldEnough for 6 to 8 as a side dish in a 9x13 pan, or about a dozen individual puddings in a muffin tin (reduce baking to about 20 minutes).