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Yorkshire Pudding
Mrs. W. Gale.
One and a half pints milk, six large tablespoonfuls flour, three eggs, one saltspoonful salt; bake under the meat for one hour and a half.
A very plain nineteenth-century batter pudding, written for a cook who had a joint of beef turning above a dripping pan. Two things need translating: the vessel and the timing.
- "Bake under the meat"The pudding was set in the dripping pan beneath the roast so the falling fat basted and browned it. In a modern oven, roast the beef on a rack over a shallow tin holding the batter, or roast first and bake the pudding in a hot tin with 2-3 tablespoons of the reserved drippings.
- MeasurementsA pint and a half of milk is 3 cups. A saltspoonful is about 1/4 teaspoon. "Six large tablespoonfuls" of flour, heaped, is roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup, but the phrase is genuinely imprecise and the resulting batter is thinner than a modern cook would expect.
- The ratioThe usual working rule for Yorkshire pudding is equal volumes of egg, milk and flour. This version is milk-heavy, which gives a flatter, more custardy, crisp-edged pudding rather than the tall hollow shells sold now. If you want lift, add flour until the batter is the consistency of thin cream.
- HeatNo oven temperature is given because the joint set it. Batter puddings need a genuinely hot oven, 425-450F, and the fat in the tin should be smoking before the batter goes in. A moderate oven produces a pale, heavy slab.
- TimingAn hour and a half suited a deep pudding in a large dripping pan under a slowly roasting joint. In a modern tin of ordinary depth, 25-35 minutes at 425F is enough; longer and it dries out. Judge by a set, well-browned surface.
- Batter restWhisk the eggs, milk, flour and salt smooth and let the batter stand 30 minutes to an hour; this hydrates the flour and is generally held to give a lighter result. Cold batter into hot fat is a common modern recommendation, though the recipe says nothing either way.
- YieldThree cups of milk and three eggs makes enough batter to fill a 9x13-inch pan shallowly, serving about eight as a side dish with roast beef and gravy.
Yorkshire pudding began as a way to make a roast go further: a batter set under the spit caught the dripping fat and filled out the plate cheaply, and in Yorkshire it was often served before the meat rather than beside it, so that hungry diners ate less beef. Early printed versions appear in eighteenth-century English cookery books as "dripping pudding" before the county name attached itself, and by the later nineteenth century the dish had become shorthand for a proper English roast dinner. The recipe's brevity is telling: contributed under a subscriber's name, with no oven temperature and no pan size, it assumes any reader knows what a dripping pan is and how a joint of beef behaves above one. Its milk-heavy proportions also suggest an older, softer style of batter pudding, closer to a savory custard than the tall, hollow, high-heat version familiar from twentieth-century kitchens.