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Yorkshire Pudding
2 eggs ¼ teaspoon salt Miss C. J. Wills Mix salt and flour, and add milk gradually to form a smooth paste; then add eggs beaten -until very light. Cover bottom of hot pan with some of beef fat tried out from roast, pour mixture in pan one-half inch deep. Bake twenty minutes in hot oven, basting after well risen, with some of the fat from pan in which meat is roasting. Cut in squares for serving. Bake, if preferred, in greased, hissing hot iron gem pans.
A straightforward batter pudding, but this printing has lost part of its ingredient list — only the eggs and salt survived, and even the salt reads as "14 teaspoon." Work from the proportions rather than the text.
- The missing quantitiesThe salt was checked against the printed page and reads a quarter teaspoon, as given here. Flour and milk are named in the method but no amounts for them appear in the ingredient list. Batter puddings of this period run to roughly equal volumes of milk and flour with two eggs, about a cup of each, which is a safe place to start.
- Hot ovenBest read as roughly 425-450F on a modern dial; the period term is not precise. Yorkshire pudding depends on the oven being fully up to heat before the batter goes in; a moderate oven gives a dense, pale slab.
- Gem pansCast-iron gem pans are the ancestor of the muffin tin. Any heavy metal muffin pan works, and it must be preheated with fat in it until the fat shimmers — the "hissing hot" in the original is the whole instruction.
- Beef fat tried out from roast"Tried out" means rendered. The dripping from a beef roast is what gives the pudding its flavour; beef tallow or, at a pinch, a neutral high-smoke-point oil will stand in, but butter will scorch at this temperature.
- The hinge: heat and depthA half-inch of batter into a pan of smoking fat is what produces the rise. Pour quickly, get it back in the oven immediately, and do not open the door during the first ten minutes.
- BastingThe original bastes with roasting-pan fat once the pudding has risen. This browns and crisps the top, but each opening of the door costs heat; if your oven recovers slowly, skip it.
- TimingTwenty minutes suits a shallow pan or gem pans. A single large pudding in a deeper dish needs 25-35 minutes and should be well browned and dry-feeling before it comes out, or it will collapse.
- YieldA batter on the scale suggested above comes to roughly 2 1/2 cups, enough for an 8-inch square pan a half-inch deep, or to part-fill the cups of a standard twelve-cup muffin tin. A 9x13 pan would need something closer to double.
Yorkshire pudding began as a way of catching what fell from a joint turning on a spit: the batter sat in a dripping pan beneath the roast, absorbed the fat, and was eaten first, with gravy, to take the edge off appetites before the more expensive meat was carved. Eighteenth-century English cookery books print it as "dripping pudding" before the regional name settles; by the time it reaches American books like this one, the spit is gone and the pudding is baked in the oven alongside or after the roast, which is why the recipe here specifies fat "tried out from roast" and basting from the meat pan. Without beef dripping it is simply a batter. The attribution to Miss C. J. Wills by name is the mark of a compiled or subscription cookbook, one that gathered recipes from individual contributors and credited them.