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Yorkshire Pudding

3/4 pound of flour. 3 pints of milk. 2 ounces of butter, melted. 6 eggs. Salt. 1/2 teaspoonful of baking powder.

Have the milk not too cold, else it sets the butter. Mix the flour with it by degrees, free from lumps. Add butter, salt, powder, the eggs well beaten and beat up all thoroughly. Butter a baking pan and make it warm in the oven. Pour in the batter less than an inch in depth. Bake 15 minutes, or till lightly browned. When the pudding is made with water instead of milk add a spoonful of golden syrup to cause it to brown quickly. If made without the butter it will puff up at the sides, but soon falls and becomes tough. On the twentieth day of August, eighteen hundred and fifty-nine, in the heighth of the Pike's Peak gold excitement in this country, Yorkshire pudding was served for dinner in the palace of Prince Frederick William of Prussia. It is best to be chronologically particular in noting these historical events, and this we know was a fact, for we have the printed menu with the royal crown and the date upon it, just as we have another, showing that on the 6th day of July, 1868, His serene Highness, the Sultan of Turkey, entertained Prince Jerome Bonaparte, where was served:

Truffle omelet; poissons frits; (doesn't say what kind of fried fish, but doubtless from the Bosphorus.) courges farcies; (stuffed Jonah's gourds); beurek, (wasn't that nice?) biftecks aux pommes; (the potatoss were a la parisienne, of course); haricots verts; (those ubiqutous snap beans!) quephte; (don't you wish you had some?) gelee au marasquin; visnali; ekmek. That caps the climax! Though it is not all the bill-of fare, only about two thirds. However, we were trying to say that while we know by the documents that Yorkshire pudding was served at the palace as stated, the other matter which we know quite as well, yet cannot demonstrate, is that the cooks there separated the eggs and made the pudding magnificent by beating the whites to a firm froth and stirring them in immediately before baking. This is the way the line reads: "Roast beef a l'Anglaise--York-Pudding." And it is preserved in the "cuisine classique."

But it is not the Yorkshire pudding they long for so much. On these cruel cold days, when even the wild animals hedge up close to the cosy settlements and the birds find wondrous attractions about the kitchen door steps, you may see poor, hungry children flattening their noses against cook shop and restaurant windows, gazing, when the inside steam allows, upon the luscious puddings, and fain would fill their bellies with the crusts that stick to the sides of the pans and no man gives unto them. They are huddle 1 in remnants of old shawls and cast off coats, twice too big, and dragging on the ground, their toes have a too close acquaintance with the snow and mire, and all doors are shut. It is not the Yorkshire pudding that they wish so much, all swimming in rich gravy though it be, because that is connected with the thought of a piece of brown, fat roast beef, and their thoughts dare not mount so high; but the pudding beside it, the batter pudding with fat in the hollows and raisins snuggling close together by twos and threes in the rich dimples. Just this square or that, and no man gives unto them.