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Yorkshire Pudding
Take an equal number of eggs and tablespoonfuls of sifted flour, and when the eggs are well whisked mix them in with the flour, adding some salt and a little grated nutmeg, and then pour in as much new milk as will make a batter of the consistency of cream. Stir the batter with a fork vigorously for ten minutes, and then put it at once into a baking-tin, which must be very hot, and contain a couple of tablespoonfuls of hot dripping. Set the pudding in an oven to bake, or before the fire under the roasting-meat. When ready to serve cut the pudding into squares, and send it to the table on a separate dish.
A batter pudding of the old proportional kind: no weights, just eggs counted against spoonfuls of flour. It works, but the ratios and the oven need translating.
- The proportionOne egg to one tablespoon of sifted flour is an egg-heavy batter by modern standards — a tablespoon of flour is only about 8 g, so four eggs take roughly a quarter of a cup. Expect something thinner and eggier than the flour-forward Yorkshire pudding of most contemporary recipes. Four eggs, 4 tablespoons flour and milk added only until the batter reaches the consistency of cream will serve four as a side dish.
- "New milk"Fresh whole milk, unskimmed and unsoured. Ordinary whole milk is the right substitute; the instruction was to distinguish it from the skimmed or turned milk a nineteenth-century kitchen might otherwise have on hand.
- Consistency of creamPourable single cream, not whipping cream — the batter should coat a spoon thinly and run off freely. Add the milk gradually; the flour quantity is small enough that a little too much milk turns it to water.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because none could be. Bake at 425–450°F. The tin and the fat must be smoking hot before the batter goes in, which is what produces the rise; a lukewarm tin gives a flat, leathery slab.
- DrippingBeef dripping, the fat rendered from the roast. Any high-smoke-point fat works — beef tallow, lard, or a neutral oil — but dripping is what gives the flavour the dish was built around.
- Ten minutes of beatingVigorous beating hydrates the flour and works air into the batter; the rise itself comes chiefly from steam. A whisk or blender does the same work in under a minute. Resting the batter before baking is a common modern practice, though the original does not mention it.
- Under the roastThe alternative method sets the tin beneath the meat on the spit or rack so the pudding catches the drippings as they fall. In a modern oven this means a tin on a lower shelf under a roast on a rack — good flavour, but the top browns less than it would in a hot tin alone.
- Timing and servingTwenty to thirty minutes for a single large tin, until well risen and deep brown; do not open the oven for the first fifteen. Cut into squares and serve on its own dish, as directed — though the recipe also allows the pudding to be baked under the roasting meat.
Yorkshire pudding began as a thrift measure: a batter set below the roasting joint to catch the dripping fat, so that nothing was wasted and the household got a filling course before the more expensive meat. Early printed versions appear in English cookery books of the mid-eighteenth century under the name "dripping pudding," with the Yorkshire attribution following soon after; Hannah Glasse's 1747 book is generally cited as the point at which the regional name stuck. The tradition of serving it first, alone with gravy, so that a small joint would stretch further, is well attested in Yorkshire and northern England. That Oscar Tschirky includes it among Waldorf kitchen recipes at the turn of the twentieth century says something about the reach of English roast-beef cookery in American hotel dining rooms, where a proper roast rib was a fixture of the menu and its accompaniments were expected to be correct. The grated nutmeg is a survival of an older English habit of spicing batter and milk puddings, and it drops out of most later versions.