No. 770

Yorkshire Pudding Garnishing

Garniture de Pouding Yorkshire

Dilute in a bowl, half a pound of flour with one pint of milk, and five whole eggs, salt, and four ounces of melted butter, keeping the paste liquid; strain it through a sieve. Cover a raised edged baking pan with a layer of melted butter or fat, pour in the preparation, having it a quarter of an inch high, set it in a slow oven, and half an hour after turn it over, and cook the other side for another half hour. When done cut it into squares or lozenges and serve it as a garnishing. A thickened gravy (No. 405) should be served at the same time.

Side Dishes

COLD SIDE DISHES (Hors-d'Œuvre Froids).

Hors-d'oeuvre, or side dishes, signifies out of the work, they having no place on the bill of fare. They are certain appetizing dishes placed on the table before dinner, remaining on in the Russian service, until the dessert; in the French service they pass round a few hors-d'oeuvre after the soup, such as melons, olives, radishes, celery, figs, artichokes, canapes, etc.

In Russia the hors-d'oeuvre is highly appreciated, and as in the Russian service the removes, entrees and roasts do not appear on the table, which should be handsomely decorated with all kinds of hors-d'oeuvre so as to make an elegant display. In formal dinners they serve in another apartment close to the dining-room, a table spread with a variety of side dishes; they also serve at the same time kummel, brandy, vermouth, absinthe, gin, etc.

← No. 769 Wings of Turkey or Pullet a la Villeroi Garn Garnishings No. 771 Alligator Pears →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is not the tall, puffed pudding of a Sunday roast but a thin baked batter, browned on both sides and cut into shapes to trim a platter of roast beef. Read it as a flat pancake baked in the oven.

The measurementsHalf a pound of flour is about 1³/₄ cups (225 g); a pint in this American book is 16 fl oz (475 ml); four ounces of butter is one stick (115 g). The result is a very loose batter, which is intended — Ranhofer directs that the paste be kept liquid.
"A slow oven"Roughly 300F. At a quarter inch deep, an hour of total baking at that temperature dries the batter into a firm sheet rather than raising it, which is exactly what a garnish needs to hold its cut edges.
Why it does not puffPoured only a quarter inch deep into a cool-ish oven, the batter sets before steam can lift it. If you want the familiar rise, this is the wrong formula and the wrong temperature; treat this recipe as a different dish.
Turning it overThe flip at the half-hour mark is the awkward step. Use a wide, shallow, well-buttered pan and slide the sheet onto a second buttered pan or a baking sheet, then invert it back — a spatula alone will tear it.
Straining the batterWorth doing. Flour lumps in a batter this thin show as blisters and pale spots on a sheet meant to be cut into neat lozenges. Letting the strained batter rest 20 minutes also softens the flour and gives a more even set.
The gravyNo. 405 is a thickened gravy given elsewhere in the book. Pan juices from the roast, degreased and thickened with a little roux, serve the same purpose.
YieldThe quantities are enough to cover something close to a half-sheet pan at a quarter inch, which would yield somewhere in the region of forty to fifty two-inch squares or diamonds — ample for bordering large platters. Halve it freely.

A Little History

Yorkshire pudding began as a dripping pudding: batter set in a pan beneath meat turning on a spit, catching the fat as it fell. Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery (1747) is generally credited with attaching Yorkshire's name to it in print, and the dish travelled with roast beef into nineteenth-century American cooking. What Charles Ranhofer does here, in the garnishing chapter of The Epicurean (1894), is characteristic of the Delmonico's kitchen he ran: a homely English batter is baked thin, trimmed into squares and lozenges, and demoted to a decorative border for the roast rather than a dish in its own right. The stray passage on hors-d'oeuvre that follows belongs to the next section of the book and has nothing to do with the pudding.