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Yorkshire Pudding (II)
Mrs. Joseph B. Leake.
To be eaten with roast beef, instead of a vegetable. Three tablespoons flour, mixed with one pint of milk, three eggs and a little salt. Pour into a shallow tin baking pan; put into oven, an hour before dinner, for ten minutes; then put it under the roasting beef and leave it till you take up the beef; leave it in about five minutes after you take up the beef; then pour off the fat and send it to the table.
A dripping-pan Yorkshire pudding of the older kind, cooked beneath the joint rather than in a preheated tin of fat. Two things need attention: the flour quantity and the fact that most modern cooks no longer roast on a rack over an open pan.
- The flour is the problemThree tablespoons of flour to a pint of milk and three eggs gives a batter closer to a savoury custard than to any Yorkshire pudding sold today. The rule of thumb usually given in modern recipes is roughly equal volumes of flour, milk and beaten egg — for a pint of milk that is nearer two cups of flour, though earlier batters varied a good deal. Whether Mrs. Leake meant three tablespoons or something larger cannot be settled from the text; make the batter as written and expect a thin, eggy, barely risen sheet.
- A pintTwo cups. American measure in this book, not the imperial 20-ounce pint.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives none. The pudding shares an oven with a roasting joint, so if adapting, a hot start of about 425F for the first ten minutes and then whatever the beef is holding — usually 325 to 350F. A hot start is what sets the edges.
- Cooking under the beefThe pan sits below the meat to catch the drippings, which means the roast must be on a rack with the pudding tin on the shelf beneath. If your roast sits in its own pan, render two or three tablespoons of beef fat, heat it in the tin until it shimmers, and pour the batter into that instead.
- TimingTen minutes alone, then under the beef until the joint is taken up, plus the five minutes after that the recipe specifies. The 'an hour before dinner' instruction implies something under an hour beneath the meat, not the full length of any roast. A long spell under the joint gives a dense, fat-soaked pudding rather than a risen one; a modern high-rise Yorkshire is a twenty-minute affair in a hot oven.
- Pouring off the fatDo this the moment it leaves the oven. Beef dripping congeals fast and the pudding turns greasy as it cools.
- Rest the batterNot in the original, but thirty minutes on the counter hydrates the flour and gives a smoother set. Whisk again before pouring.
- YieldA pint of milk in a shallow pan will serve six to eight as an accompaniment, cut into squares.
Yorkshire pudding began as dripping pudding: a batter set beneath a joint turning on a spit, catching the fat that would otherwise be wasted. The Yorkshire name is generally traced to Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy of 1747, though the technique was older and by no means confined to that county. It is often said that the pudding was served first, on its own with gravy, so that a small joint of beef would stretch further. Its appearance in a North American community cookbook of the 1870s, under a contributor's name, shows how thoroughly English roast-beef practice had travelled; the recipe assumes without comment that the reader has an oven with a shelf above the pudding tin.