Home › Some Kitchen Kinks › Some Kitchen Kinks: Yorkshire
Some Kitchen Kinks: Yorkshire
Roast Beef with Yorkshire Pudding.
The beef is roasted as usual and the pudding made as follows:
Yorkshire Pudding. 3 eggs. 1 pint milk. 1 cupful flour. 1 teaspoonful salt.
Beat the eggs until very light, then add the milk. Pour the mixture over the flour, add the salt, and beat well.
Bake in hissing hot gem pans or in an ordinary baking pan for fortyfive minutes, and baste with drippings from the beef. If gem pans are used, they should be placed on a dripping pan to protect the floor of the oven from the fat. Many cooks prefer to bake Yorkshire pudding in the pan with the meat; in this case the roast should be placed on a rack and the pudding batter poured on the pan under it.
A workable batter, but the book assumes a coal range and a cook who knows what "hissing hot" means. Two things carry the dish: fat hot enough to make the batter climb, and an oven left shut.
- Gem pansGem pans are cast-iron muffin or popover pans. Any heavy muffin tin or popover pan works; the point is metal that holds heat, preheated with the fat in it until the fat shimmers or faintly smokes.
- No temperature is givenAssume a hot oven, 425-450F, for the first 15 minutes so the batter sets and rises, then 375-400F to dry the inside. A cooler start gives a heavy, damp pudding.
- Rethink the 45 minutesForty-five minutes suits one large pudding in a baking pan. Individual puddings in gem pans are done in 20-25 minutes; held the full three quarters of an hour they go dry and hollow.
- A pint is two cupsSo the ratio here is 2 cups milk to 1 cup flour with 3 eggs, thinner than most modern recipes. Expect a custardy, popover-like pudding with a soft centre rather than a bready one. Weigh the flour at about 4 1/2 oz if you want it consistent.
- Rest the batterNot in the original, but 30 minutes to an hour at room temperature lets the flour hydrate and gives a better rise. Beat it again briefly before pouring.
- Do not open the ovenThe instruction to baste with beef drippings fights against the rise. If you baste at all, do it once in the last ten minutes; better to put 1-2 tablespoons of hot beef fat in each cup before the batter goes in.
- Pudding under the roastThis is the traditional method and it works, but only with a roast that still has fat to give. Pour the batter into the hot pan beneath the rack toward the end of roasting, and expect the top to be uneven where the meat drips.
- YieldAbout 12 muffin-sized puddings, or one 9x13 pan cut into squares. Serves six to eight alongside a roast.
Yorkshire pudding began as thrift: a batter set under the spit to catch the fat and juices falling from roasting meat, so nothing was wasted and the family had something filling before the expensive part of the meal. Early printed versions, including Hannah Glasse's "A Yorkshire Pudding" of 1747, describe that dripping-pan method, and it is often said that in Yorkshire the pudding was eaten first, with gravy, to blunt appetites -- though this is tradition rather than documented household practice. By the time this book was written, American kitchens had ranges rather than open hearths, which may be why the writer offers gem pans as an alternative and warns about fat spilling onto the oven floor; the individual, high-rising pudding familiar today belongs to that later world of the closed oven.