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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.
This is a hotel-scale batter written for a pastry cook with a coal range, so the quantities are large and the oven heat is assumed rather than stated. The proportions themselves are sound and scale down cleanly by halves or quarters.
- The quantities in modern terms3/4 lb flour is about 2 3/4 cups; 3 pints of milk is 6 cups. That is a thin, crepe-like batter by design, which is what allows it to rise in a shallow layer.
- The oven temperature the recipe omitsFifteen minutes to a light brown means a hot oven, 425-450F. A moderate oven will set the batter before steam can lift it and you will get a pale, heavy slab.
- Heat the pan properly"Make it warm in the oven" is doing a lot of work here. The greased pan should be properly hot before the batter goes in; the initial blast of heat is what raises the pudding. With butter rather than beef dripping, though, it cannot be taken to smoking point without burning.
- Depth mattersLess than an inch is not a casual instruction. A deeper pour steams instead of puffing, and the 15-minute timing no longer applies.
- Rest the batterModern practice is to let the mixed batter stand 30 minutes to an hour so the flour hydrates. The half teaspoonful of baking powder here supplies a little chemical lift instead; traditional Yorkshire pudding carries none, and it can be left out if the batter rests and the oven is hot.
- Butter versus drippingThe note that a butterless pudding puffs at the sides then collapses is accurate. Traditionally the fat is beef dripping from the roast, which browns better than butter and gives the flavour the closing paragraph is describing.
- The separated-egg versionThe whites beaten to a firm froth and folded in just before baking give a lighter, more souffle-like result that must go into the oven immediately. It sets faster, so watch it from about 10 minutes.
- YieldAs written this is a large batch, roughly two quarts of batter, enough to fill a big shallow pan to well under an inch and to serve a dozen or more. Quarter it for a household batch: about 3/4 cup flour, 1 1/2 cups milk, 1 1/2 eggs, 1/2 oz butter.
Yorkshire pudding began as dripping pudding, a batter set beneath roasting meat to catch the fat falling from the spit, and the name is generally traced to Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery of 1747, which prints it as "Yorkshire pudding." The oven version here, baked in a greased pan rather than under the joint, is what happened once ranges replaced open hearths and the spit disappeared. The rambling detour through royal menus and the closing scene of hungry children at a cookshop window are characteristic of this book's author, who padded his recipe collections with anecdote, sentiment and jokes about French bills of fare. Note too that his pudding is placed against "roast beef a l'Anglaise," a line taken from a French-language royal bill of fare.