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Roast Beef with Pudding
Bake exactly as directed for ordinary roast for the table; then make a Yorkshire pudding, to eat like vegetables with the roast, as follows: For every pint of milk take three eggs, three cups of flour, and a pinch of salt; stir to a smooth batter, and pour into the dripping-pan under the meat, half an hour before it is done. - Mrs. C. T. Carson.
Two recipes in one line: the roast is assumed, the pudding is the point. Everything hinges on heat and fat — the batter must hit dripping that is smoking hot, or it will sit flat and greasy.
- The measurementsA pint of milk is 2 cups. Three eggs and 3 cups of flour to that pint gives a noticeably thicker batter than modern Yorkshire pudding, which usually runs closer to equal volumes of flour, milk and egg (about 1 1/2 cups flour to 2 cups milk and 4 eggs). If you want the tall, hollow, crisp-walled version, reduce the flour; as written you will get something denser and more cake-like.
- Oven heat is the whole trickThe recipe names no temperature, but a batter like this needs a hot oven; 425 to 450F is about right. A beef roast cooked at a modern 325F will give you little or no rise. If you are roasting low, pull the meat to rest, raise the oven to 450F, and cook the pudding in the hot fat on its own.
- "Pour into the dripping-pan under the meat"The nineteenth-century roast hung or sat on a rack over a shallow pan that caught the fat. The batter goes into that fat. The pan and fat must be genuinely hot — put the empty pan back in the oven until the drippings shimmer, then pour the batter in one go and do not open the door for 20 minutes.
- Fat quantityYou need roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons of beef dripping for a 9x13 pan. Modern trimmed roasts often throw off very little; make up the difference with more dripping saved from an earlier roast, or with beef tallow.
- Rest the batterNot in the original, but it matters: mix and let it stand 30 minutes to an hour so the flour hydrates. Batter used straight from the whisk rises less. Stir it once more before pouring.
- TimingHalf an hour under the meat is right for a shallow pan at high heat. Individual puddings in a muffin tin take 18 to 22 minutes. It should be deep brown and firm at the edges; underbaked Yorkshire pudding collapses the moment it leaves the oven.
- YieldThis quantity fills a 9x13 pan and serves eight to ten alongside a roast, or makes about 12 individual puddings.
Yorkshire pudding began as "dripping pudding" — batter cooked in the pan beneath a joint turning on a spit, so nothing of the fat was wasted. The Yorkshire name is generally traced to Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747), and the northern English custom of serving it before the meat, with gravy, to take the edge off appetites before an expensive joint was carved is often cited though hard to document precisely. Mrs. Carson's instruction to eat it "like vegetables with the roast" shows how the dish had been absorbed into American practice by the time The Dixie Cook Book appeared: no longer a first course, but a starchy side dish sharing the plate with the beef. It also records an older way of working — a pan set under a roast to catch drippings — at a time when enclosed ranges and roasting pans that held the meat in its own fat were already in wide use.