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Yorkshire Pudding
Make a batter of 6 eggs, 3/4 pint of milk, and 1/2 pound of flour. Beat well and pour into a shallow pan. Fill with 1 pound steak and 1/2 pound stewed kidney, cut in slices, and 1 cup of stock. Lay the rest of the batter over. Bake 3 hours. Serve hot. This is really an entree.
This is not the crisp popover-style Yorkshire pudding of a modern roast dinner but a baked batter pudding with meat set in it — closer to what English cooks called toad-in-the-hole. Read it that way and the long bake makes sense.
- The hinge: batter enclosing meatBatter goes into the pan first, the meat and stock on top, and "the rest of the batter" over as a lid; the recipe does not say how it is divided. It sets into a dense, custardy shell rather than rising and hollowing, because the wet filling keeps it from puffing.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as was normal. A three-hour bake with raw steak in it belongs at 325-350F; anything hotter will set and scorch the batter long before the beef and kidney are tender.
- The three hours is for the meatThe recipe specifies only "steak," but a three-hour bake implies a tough braising cut, which with the kidney needs that long at a low temperature to become tender. A quick-cooking cut would be ruined by the timing.
- "3/4 pint of milk"The pint is ambiguous: 15 fl oz if imperial, 12 fl oz if American. Either gives a workable batter with 1/2 lb flour (about 1 3/4 cups); start at the lower figure and thin to heavy-cream consistency.
- Stewed kidneyThe kidney is already partly cooked before it goes in. Beef or veal kidney should be trimmed of core and fat and soaked in cold salted water or milk for an hour first, or its flavour will dominate everything.
- "A shallow pan"Shallow relative to a boiled pudding basin, not a sheet pan. A 9x13-inch dish or a deep pie dish two to three inches high holds this without the batter and stock running over.
- YieldAbout six servings. The last line, "This is really an entree," marks it as a dish in its own right rather than an accompaniment to roast beef.
The batter pudding cooked in the same fire as the meat is far older than the name; it began as a "dripping pudding" set beneath the roasting spit to catch the fat, and Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery of 1747 is generally credited with fixing the label "Yorkshire pudding" in print. Its original household purpose was economy: served first, with gravy, it took the edge off appetites before the expensive joint appeared, which is why old northern kitchens insisted the pudding came before the beef and not beside it. The version here takes the logic a step further by burying the meat in the batter altogether, a treatment English cookery also called toad-in-the-hole.