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Yorkshire Pudding
½ teaspoon salt 4 eggs Beat eggs; add flour and salt, gradually; continue beating. Add milk and continue beating five minutes. The mixture should be perfectly smooth. One half hour before meat is done, pour this mixture into dripping pan under meat and baste when basting meat, turning pan that pudding may be golden brown throughout.
Yorkshire pudding cooked in this way is considered by many to be too rich. A very good substitute is obtained by cooking in hissing hot gem pans, thirty minutes.
Serve pudding, cut in squares, on platter around beef.
A dripping-pan Yorkshire pudding of the old school, batter poured beneath a roast and basted with its fat. The instructions carry over intact; the quantities need a modern reading.
- The batter proportionsThe listed quantities begin mid-line with the salt and eggs, so the flour and milk amounts are not recoverable from this page. Batters of this type generally run to roughly equal volumes of flour and milk, which with four eggs would suggest something in the region of 1 cup flour and 1 cup milk -- but that is a reconstruction, not the book's own figure.
- BeatingFive minutes of beating by hand is doing the work of gluten development and aeration. A blender or food processor reaches the same smoothness in about thirty seconds; rest the batter half an hour afterward so the flour hydrates and the bubbles settle.
- Cooking under the roastThis assumes an open dripping pan sitting beneath a joint on a rack, with fat falling into the batter. A modern roast in a covered or high-sided pan will steam the pudding rather than crisp it. If you want the traditional version, set the beef on a rack directly over the pan.
- "Hissing hot gem pans"Gem pans are cast-iron muffin pans. The heat of the metal is the whole point: preheat the pan with a spoonful of beef drippings in each cup until the fat shimmers and smokes faintly, then pour the batter in and do not open the oven.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none, because the pudding took whatever heat the roast was in. For the gem-pan version, 425F for the first 15 minutes to force the rise, then 375F for the remaining 15.
- Basting and turningTurning the pan compensates for uneven oven heat and for the pan's position beneath the roast. In a modern oven, rotate once at the halfway point and leave it otherwise alone; every door opening costs you height.
- YieldDepends on the missing flour and milk amounts. On the assumed 1 cup flour and 1 cup milk, a four-egg batter would roughly fill a 12-cup muffin pan, serving six to eight alongside a roast.
Yorkshire pudding began as a way to catch and stretch the drippings from a joint turning before an open fire, the batter set in a pan beneath the spit so that nothing rich was wasted. It was commonly served before the meat rather than with it, filling the household on cheap flour and milk so that less beef went round more people. By the time this book was printed, American ranges had closed the fire away inside an oven and the dish had become a garnish for the roast rather than a first course; the recipe here ends with squares arranged around the beef on the platter. The note that the dripping-pan version is "too rich" for many tastes, and the muffin-pan substitute offered in its place, may hint at the point at which the pudding started to become the individual popover-shaped thing most cooks now recognize, though that reading is speculation rather than something the page states.