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Roast Beef with Yorkshire Pudding
2 cups flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 3 eggs 2 cups milk Roast the beef as usual. Mix the flour with the salt; add the beaten eggs and the milk and stir until the batter is smooth. Pour into a shallow baking pan containing a little of the drippings from the roast beef. Let the batter be only one inch thick and bake from thirty to forty-five minutes, basting, after it is risen, with some of the fat from the pan in which the beef is roasting. Cut into squares and place it around the roast beef.
The ingredient list runs backwards here: the pudding batter comes first, the beef at the end. Read it as two recipes that share a pan of fat.
- Oven heat is the hingeYorkshire pudding rises on steam, and modern practice puts that at a hot oven, around 425-450F, with the fat shimmering before the batter goes in. The recipe names no temperature; it assumes the oven is already going for the roast, so if the beef has been roasting at a moderate heat, or if you rest it first, put the pan of drippings back into a hotter oven until the fat shimmers.
- Skip the bastingOpening the door mid-bake drops the temperature and collapses the rise; leave it shut for the first 25 minutes.
- Batter quantities and panTwo cups flour, three eggs and two cups milk make roughly four to four and a half cups of batter. At the one-inch depth the recipe calls for, that suits about an 8-inch square pan; spread in a 9x13 it would be only about half an inch deep. Let the batter stand 30 minutes before baking.
- Thirty to forty-five minutesA one-inch pan of batter this size does want the full range the recipe gives. It should be deeply browned and hollow-sounding; pulled early it sinks into custard as it cools.
- Lardoons of porkStrips of fatback or salt pork, cut about 1/4 inch square and threaded through the lean meat with a larding needle. Thick-cut unsmoked bacon or fatback from a butcher works; the point is to keep a lean round from drying out.
- Beef from the roundRound is leaner than rib or sirloin, which is presumably why the pork lardoons and the flour-and-water dredge are here. Roast 5 lb at 325F to an internal 130-135F for medium-rare and slice it thin across the grain, or the joint will be tough regardless of larding; note that the pudding will then need a hotter oven than the roast has been getting.
- Flour and waterThe flour and water at the end of the list are never used in the method. The likeliest reading is a dredge for the roast and a pan gravy: the drippings thickened with the flour and let down with water once the pudding batter has taken its share of fat.
Yorkshire pudding began as a thrift measure rather than a side dish: batter set in a tin beneath a joint turning on a spit caught the falling fat, stretching a small amount of meat across more people, and by long-repeated tradition was eaten first with gravy so that appetites were blunted before the beef came round. Early printed versions, including Hannah Glasse's mid-eighteenth-century "Yorkshire pudding," describe that arrangement under the meat. By the time Mrs. Fryer was writing for American home cooks with closed gas and coal ranges, the spit was gone and the batter had migrated into a shallow pan of borrowed drippings, which may be why she specifies basting at all - a step the old dripping-pan method did for free. The pairing with beef from the round rather than a rib roast suits a household recipe for a cheap, lean cut, larded with pork and served with a filling batter cut into squares.