The Yorkshire Pudding is a development of much earlier Under Roast Batter Puddings and Cryspels, cooked flour-batters to accompany meat.
Yorkshire Puddings crown a roast platter
Image: www.refugemcr.co.uk
Yorkshires may be made as one large pudding to be filled or sliced, or as small individual puddings. A necessary part of the Roast Beef Dinner, Yorkshire pudding is most traditionally, in Yorkshire, eaten with gravy as a separate course prior to the main meat dish. The small Yorkshires used as a main meal accompaniment may be referred to as 'popovers'.
Large type Yorkshire Pudding
Image: Gordon Joly
Original Receipt in 'The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy' by Hannah Glasse, 1747 (Glasse 1747);A Yorkshire pudding.
TAKE a quart of milk, four eggs, and a little salt, make it up into a thick batter with flour, like a pancake batter. You must have a good piece of meat at the fire, take a stew-pan and put some dripping in, set it on the fire; when it boils, pour in your pudding; let it bake on the fire till you think it is night enough, then turn a plate upside down in the dripping pan, that the dripping may not be blacked; set your stew-pan on it under your meat, and let the dripping drop on the pudding, and the heat of the fire come to it, to make it of a fine brown. When your meat is done and sent to table, drain all the fat from your pudding, and set it on the fire again to dry a little; then slide it as dry as you can into a dish, melt some butter, and pour it into a cup, and set it in the middle of the pudding. It is an excellent good pudding; the gravy of the meat eats well with it.
Small type Yorkshire Puddings as part of a Sunday Roast
Image: Robbie Jim
Original Receipt in 'The Book of Household Management', 1861, edited by Isabella Beeton (See Mrs.B)YORKSHIRE PUDDING, to serve with hot Roast Beef.
1384. INGREDIENTS: 1-½ pint of milk, 6 large tablespoonfuls of flour, 3 eggs, 1 saltspoonful of salt.
Mode: Put the flour into a basin with the salt, and stir gradually to this enough milk to make it into a stiff batter. When this is perfectly smooth, and all the lumps are well rubbed down, add the remainder of the milk and the eggs, which should be well beaten. Beat the mixture for a few minutes, and pour it into a shallow tin, which has been previously well rubbed with beef dripping. Put the pudding into the oven, and bake it for an hour; then, for another½ hour, place it under the meat, to catch a little of the gravy that flows from it. Cut the pudding into small square pieces, put them on a hot dish, and serve. If the meat is baked, the pudding may at once be placed under it, resting the former on a small three-cornered stand.
Time: 1-½ hour.
Average cost: 7d.
Sufficient: for 5 or 6 persons.
Seasonable: at any time.
Hull Daily Mail - Saturday 13 April 1918