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Yorkshire Pudding
One pint of milk; two eggs; one teaspoon of salt; five tablespoons of flour. Place the flour and salt together in a pan and add sufficient milk to make a stiff batter. Then gradually add the remainder of the milk until all is used. Beat the eggs until light, add them, stirring well, then pour into a shallow tin that has been well oiled. Bake for one-half hour in a hot oven, then place the pudding under the meat for fifteen minutes to catch the gravy that flows from it. The best roasting is done on a small rack of wire held up by four strong legs. This makes it easy to lay the pudding under the meat. Cut the pudding into small squares and serve with the beef.
BEEF À LA MODE-Take two pounds of beef; two tablespoons of beef or pork drippings; one onion, sliced thin; one bay leaf; one lemon cut in slices; two teaspoons of salt; one-half teaspoon of pepper; one-fourth teaspoon of ground allspice; one-fourth teaspoon of cloves; one-eighth teaspoon of mace. The meat used for this purpose may be from the round or any other 1-RIB LAMB CHOPS (FRENCHED) 2-LOIN LAMB CHOPS 3-RIB LAMB CHOPS 5 4-BLADE SHOULDER CHOP 5-ROUND BONE SHOULDER CHOP 6-CHUCK STEAK 7-SKIRT STEAK 8-FLANK STEAK
part that is lean. Cut it into pieces of about three ounces weight, and dredge well with flour. Put the beef drippings and the sliced onion in a large saucepan, and when hot put in the meat and stir constantly for ten minutes. Dredge in more flour until the mixture is well thickened, adding the bay leaf, which should be broken, and sprinkling in the spices, which should be well mixed together; add also the salt and pepper and sliced lemon. When these have been well stirred together, pour in gradually, still stirring, enough water to cover the meat.
Place the cover on the saucepan and simmer gently for four hours.
POT ROAST-A tough piece of meat may be made very tender by this mode of cooking. Wipe the meat with a damp cloth, and put it into an iron pot with a little hot fat or butter. Place the latter over a moderate heat, and brown the meat slowly, turning it frequently; this will usually take about twenty minutes. When the roast is well browned, season with salt and pepper, put in one-half pint of boiling water, cover closely, and set the pot back where the meat will cook slowly. As the water steams away add a little more, one-fourth pint at a time. Allow about twenty-five minutes to each pound for a piece of meat that is not tough, but a very tough roast will require twice that time. Take up the meat, and add a small quantity of water to the juices in the kettle. Thicken the gravy with a little flour stirred to a thin paste with a little water, and serve in a separate dish. Boiled rice is generally served with a pot roast.
FILLET OF BEEF, WITH MUSHROOM SAUCE (Fillet Mignon)-The fillet is the under side of the loin of beef-the tenderloin. The skin and fat should be removed with a sharp knife, and also every shred of muscle and ligament. If the fillet is not then of a good, round shape, skewer it until it is so. Lard the upper surface. Rub over with soft butter, dredge well with salt, pepper and flour, and place it without water in a small pan. Put in a hot oven for thirty minutes, leaving it the first ten minutes on the lower part of the oven, and then placing it on the grating for the remainder of the time. See Chapter on Sauces for Fish, Meats, Poultry and Game.
A plain pre-war Yorkshire pudding, written for a cook with a roast already on a rack over a dripping pan. Two things need attention before you start: the flour quantity and the fat.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no figure; "hot" in cookbooks of this period is conventionally taken as roughly 425-450F. The pan and its fat should go in first and be hot before the batter is poured, or the pudding will not lift.
- The flour looks wrongThe flour looks low -- five tablespoons of flour to a pint of milk gives a very thin batter and is likely to bake flat rather than rise much. Period recipes commonly call for considerably more flour, on the order of a cup or two to a pint of milk with two to four eggs; treat the five tablespoons as either a typographical slip or a deliberately flat, very tender pudding.
- VesselA "shallow tin" here is a rectangular dripping pan or a sheet pan with sides — a single large pudding cut into squares, not individual cups. A 9x13 metal pan is the closest modern equivalent; glass and ceramic do not get hot enough fast enough.
- "Well oiled" means beef fat"Well oiled" probably means beef dripping -- the point of the dish is the fat, though the book says only "well oiled." Two to three tablespoons of beef fat, heated until it shimmers, will give a better lift than pouring batter into a merely greased pan.
- Resting the batterThe instruction to add milk to the flour in stages is to avoid lumps, which a whisk or blender handles in seconds. Letting the finished batter stand 30 minutes to an hour is often recommended, though how much it actually improves the rise is disputed.
- The step under the meatFifteen minutes beneath a roast in a modern oven means the pudding sits on a lower shelf catching drips, which will soften the top. If you want a crisp pudding, skip it and spoon pan juices over at the table instead.
- Timing with the roastYorkshire pudding wants a hotter oven than the last stage of a roast. Standard practice now is to rest the beef out of the oven, raise the heat, and bake the pudding during the rest — the roast will hold 20 to 30 minutes loosely covered.
- YieldA pint of milk makes a thin layer in a 9x13 pan and gives eight to ten squares, enough for a family roast.
Yorkshire pudding began as a way of making a joint of beef feed more people: batter set in a pan beneath meat turning on a spit, cooking in the fat and juices that fell from it. Eighteenth-century English cookery books call it dripping pudding, and the Yorkshire name is generally traced to Hannah Glasse, who used it in The Art of Cookery in 1747. Traditionally it was served before the meat, with gravy, so that a cheap flour-and-milk dish blunted the appetite before the expensive beef appeared. The Butterick book's aside about a wire rack on four strong legs marks the moment of transition: the open spit and hearth were gone, but cooks were still being told how to rig a closed range oven to imitate the dripping that made the pudding work in the first place.