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Yorkshire Pudding
1 pint (2 cups) milk 3 eggs 6 ozs. (6 heaping tablespoonfuls) flour 3 tablespoonfuls of dripping 1/2 teaspoonful salt ½ teaspoonful baking powder Sift the flour into an earthenware basin with the baking powder and the salt, stir in the milk gradually, beat up the eggs, and add to the batter when quite smooth; allow this to stand in a cool place for two hours; melt the dripping in a casserole, pour in the batter, and bake in a hot oven for half an hour.
Serve with roast beef.
A straightforward batter pudding, but two details in the original decide whether it rises: the fat must be smoking before the batter meets it, and the oven must be genuinely hot.
- The hinge: hot fatMelting the dripping is not enough. Put the greased dish in the oven until the fat shimmers and just begins to smoke, then pour the batter in and return it immediately. Batter poured into warm fat sets slowly and stays flat.
- "A hot oven"Read this as 425-450F (220-230C). Yorkshire pudding depends on steam generated fast, and a moderate oven produces a dense, custardy slab. Do not open the door during the half hour.
- The flour measurement is inconsistent6 oz of flour is about 1 1/3 cups; six heaping tablespoons is nowhere near that, perhaps half as much. Go by the weight, which gives the correct thin-cream batter with a pint of milk.
- CasseroleHere the word appears to mean the fireproof earthenware dish itself rather than a covered stew. Use a shallow metal roasting tin or a cast-iron pan for the best rise; thick earthenware heats too slowly to shock the batter.
- DrippingBeef dripping, saved from a roast. Beef tallow or the rendered fat from the joint you are serving is the authentic substitute; a neutral high-smoke-point oil works, at some cost in flavour. Butter will burn at this temperature.
- Baking powderHalf a teaspoon is unusual in traditional Yorkshire pudding, which rises on steam and beaten egg alone. It is harmless, and can be left out without changing the result much.
- Resting the batterTwo hours in a cool place lets the flour hydrate and the gluten relax. Overnight in the refrigerator is better still; stir and let it come back toward room temperature before it goes into the fat.
- YieldA pint of milk and three eggs fills a 9x13-inch tin and serves six to eight as an accompaniment. The same batter divided among a twelve-cup muffin tin needs about 20 minutes.
Batter puddings baked under a turning joint are recorded in English cookery from the early eighteenth century, the dripping pan catching both the fat and the meat juices; Hannah Glasse printed a version under the name "Yorkshire pudding" in 1747, and the county attribution stuck. The point was economy as much as pleasure, since a cheap flour-and-milk batter enriched with roast fat stretched a small joint across a large table, and in many households it was eaten first, with gravy, before the beef appeared. Its presence in a casserole-cookery book of the early twentieth century marks the shift away from the open spit: with no dripping pan beneath a roast, the pudding had to be given a dish of its own and a hot oven to imitate what the fire once did for it.