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Yorkshire Pudding (No. 1)
1 pint milk 6 ounces Five Roses flour 2 eggs ¼ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon baking powder.
Put the flour in a basin with the salt, and stir in the milk gradually. Beat up the eggs and add to the batter when quite smooth. Allow to stand 2 hours, add the baking powder and pour into a wellgreased baking pan. Bake ½ hour. 3 eggs
A plain batter pudding of the sort that fills out a roast dinner. The original gives no oven temperature and a slightly garbled ingredient list, so a few decisions have to be made before you start.
- The stray "3 eggs"The line ends with a second, contradictory egg quantity, most likely a printer's error. Two eggs to a pint of milk gives a lighter, more traditional batter; three gives a richer, more custardy one. Pick one and ignore the other.
- A pint of milkFive Roses is a Canadian book, so the pint here is imperial: 20 fluid ounces, or 2½ US cups. Using a US pint of 2 cups will give a noticeably thicker batter.
- Six ounces of flourWeigh it if you can — about 1⅓ cups scooped and levelled. The batter should pour like thin cream; that ratio is the whole point of the dish.
- Oven heatNone is given, which is the recipe's biggest omission. Yorkshire pudding needs a genuinely hot oven, 425–450°F, with the greased pan preheated until the fat shimmers before the batter goes in. A moderate oven produces a pale, flat, eggy slab.
- The two-hour restNot optional padding. Resting hydrates the flour and relaxes the gluten, which gives a better rise and a more tender crumb. An hour at room temperature or overnight in the refrigerator both work.
- The baking powderAdded at the end so it does not exhaust itself during the rest. Classic Yorkshire pudding uses none at all, relying on steam and a hot pan; half a teaspoon here is insurance against a lukewarm oven and can be left out if your oven is properly hot.
- Fat in the panThe recipe says only "well-greased"; beef dripping from the roast would have been the likely choice in a book of this date. Beef fat, lard or a neutral high-smoke-point oil all work; butter will scorch at the temperature this needs.
- Timing and yieldHalf an hour suits one large pan; individual puddings in a muffin tin are done in 18–22 minutes. Do not open the door in the first 20 minutes. A pint of milk yields enough for 6 to 8 as a side dish, and it should be eaten straight from the oven.
Yorkshire pudding began as a way to make a small joint of meat feed more people: the batter was set beneath the spit so it caught the drippings, and it was served first, with gravy, before the beef appeared. Hannah Glasse printed a version under the name in 1747, though similar dripping puddings are older and were not confined to Yorkshire. By the time this recipe reached a Canadian flour-company cookbook in the early twentieth century the spit was long gone, the pudding had moved into a pan in the oven, and it had acquired a pinch of baking powder.