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Yorkshire Pudding
2 eggs 1 cup milk 1 cup Gold Medal flour 1/4 teaspoon salt Mix and sift salt and flour. Add the milk gradually to make a smooth paste. Beat eggs very light and add to the batter; beat well, bake in hot, well greased iron gem pans for thirty-five minutes. Baste with drippings from the beef after they are well risen. This batter may be poured into the roasting pan and baked, basting with beef drippings.
A plain batter pudding of the sort that stood or fell on the heat of the pan. The original assumes a coal range and a joint of beef roasting nearby; both are easily replaced, but the temperature is not negotiable.
- The hinge: a screaming hot, fat-filled panThe batter has no leavening but steam, so the fat in the tins must be shimmering before the batter goes in. Heat the greased pans in the oven until the drippings smoke faintly, then pour and return them at once.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe specifies hot pans but never states an oven heat. A 'hot' oven in this period is generally put at 425–450F; starting there for the first 15 minutes and dropping to about 375F for the remainder will set the interiors without scorching the crusts.
- Thirty-five minutesThe recipe gives that time for the gem pans; the roasting-pan version is offered as an alternative with no time stated. Smaller gem-pan puddings may well be done sooner, in 20–25 minutes; opening the door early collapses them, so judge by colour.
- Iron gem pansGem pans were heavy cast-iron muffin tins, and their mass is what gives the initial blast of heat. A cast-iron popover pan or a well-preheated heavy muffin tin is the nearest match; thin nonstick tins will give a flabbier rise.
- Mixing orderThe recipe builds a paste from flour and milk first, then adds beaten eggs. This is the classic method for avoiding lumps without a whisk or blender. Resting the finished batter 30 minutes gives a better rise, though the original does not call for it.
- Beef drippingsBasting with the fat from the roast is the whole point of the flavour. If you are not roasting beef, use rendered beef fat or, failing that, a neutral oil with a high smoke point — butter alone will burn at these temperatures.
- YieldRoughly 8 to 10 gem-pan puddings, or one pudding poured into the roasting pan as the recipe directs, serving four to six alongside a roast.
Yorkshire pudding began as a thrift measure: batter set in a dish beneath a joint turning on a spit, catching the fat and juices that would otherwise be lost, and served before the meat to blunt appetites when beef was dear. The name is generally traced to Hannah Glasse, whose 1747 The Art of Cookery printed it as "Yorkshire pudding" after earlier books had called much the same thing a dripping pudding. By the time this Gold Medal book appeared, American ranges had largely displaced the open hearth, and the instruction to bake in gem pans and baste with reserved drippings is a direct accommodation to that change — the pudding no longer sat under the meat, so the fat had to be brought to it. Flour-company cook books like this one were promotional literature, distributed cheaply or free, and they leaned on familiar British-American standards to demonstrate that the branded flour behaved reliably in dishes a housekeeper already knew.