Yorkshire Pudding
Of all the English counties Yorkshire has contrived, with the rare spirit of adventure and mother-wit which belongs to the Yorkshireman in all his dealings, to take the foremost place for cookery in the estimation of the world. It may be that this is the result more of accident than of taste. It is difficult to believe in the taste of a province which eats mustard with apple pie ; still the culinary reputation of the shire is a fact. The Yorkshire ham is rivalled by the Cheshire cheese in renown. All over Europe the Shesterre is known as well as the jambon d'Yorck. But these are not properly the achievements of the kitchen. Wherever the roast beef of Old England is heard of, there the Yorkshire pudding is known; and nothing like this can be said of any other English county.
Take an equal number of eggs and of large tablespoonfuls of flour. Whisk the eggs well, mix them gradually with the flour, add salt with a trifle of nutmeg, and pour in as much new milk as will reduce the batter to the consistence of cream. Work, the batter vigorously for ten minutes, to make it light, and then at once pour it into a baking-tin, which must be very hot, with two ounces of dripping in it. Set the pudding to bake before the fire under the roast meat for about half an hour before it is taken up; and when it is ready, cut it into squares and Zest send it to table on a dish by itself. This is the true Yorkshire method-the pudding being only half an inch thick, and not turned in the baking. But in most other counties the plan is to make the pudding an inch thick, and either to turn it on the baking-tin or to turn it out of one baking-tin on to another, in order to brown it on both sides. If the meat is not roasted but baked, the pudding may still be placed under it, the meat resting upon a tripod in the middle of the baking-tin.
The instructions are complete but assume a joint turning on a spit with a tin beneath it catching the drip. The two things that matter most are heat and fat: the tin and its dripping must be smoking before the batter touches them.
- The proportions"An equal number of eggs and of large tablespoonfuls of flour" is looser than it sounds. A heaped tablespoon of flour is roughly 15 g, so four eggs to four spoonfuls gives about 60 g flour, an unusually egg-rich batter; a level spoon halves that. Treat the milk as the control and take the batter to single-cream consistency, around 250-300 ml for four eggs.
- New milkFresh whole milk, straight from the dairy and not skimmed. Ordinary full-fat milk is the equivalent. Some cooks cut it with water for a lighter rise.
- DrippingBeef dripping, the fat rendered from the roast. Two ounces is about 55 g. Any fat with a high smoke point works, but dripping is what gives the flavour the dish was built around.
- Oven heatThere is no temperature here because the pudding sat under a spit-roast in front of the fire. Bake at 425-450F (220-230C), with the tin and fat preheated in the oven until the fat shimmers and just begins to smoke.
- Rest the batterThe recipe says to beat for ten minutes and pour "at once." Modern practice is to let the batter stand at least thirty minutes so the flour hydrates and the gluten relaxes, which gives a better rise.
- Thickness and timingHalf an inch is the Yorkshire version described here; the recipe allows about half an hour under the meat, and at a high oven heat it will be done in rather less. The inch-thick, turned version of the other counties needs longer.
- Under the meatTo get the same effect without a spit, roast the beef on a rack set over the pudding tin for the last part of cooking, or simply roast the joint on an upper shelf with the pudding tin directly below it. Both let the drip fall into the batter.
- YieldA batter of four eggs in a standard roasting tin cuts into eight to ten squares, enough for four to six people alongside a joint.
Yorkshire pudding began as a dripping pudding: a batter set beneath meat turning on a spit, catching the fat and juices that would otherwise be wasted. A recipe under that name appears in The Whole Duty of a Woman (1737), and Hannah Glasse printed "A Yorkshire Pudding" ten years later, which is generally credited with fixing the county's name to the dish. The distinction Kettner's draws here is a real one and still argued over: the thin, once-baked Yorkshire version against the thicker, turned pudding of elsewhere. The passage directs only that the pudding be cut into squares and sent to table on a dish by itself; the northern custom of serving it before the beef, to fill the diners cheaply ahead of the meat, is a widely repeated tradition rather than something this text states. Kettner's Book of the Table (1877) was written by E. S. Dallas, a journalist and critic rather than a cook, which accounts for the essay on Yorkshire's reputation that opens the entry before any batter is mixed.