A Toot Hansell Christmas Cracker by Kim M. Watt

Author:Kim M. Watt
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781838326500
Publisher: Kim M. Watt
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

YORKSHIRE PUDDINGS

Right, we’ve already established that I was worried about creating a cross-border incident by renaming Welsh rarebit, and now I get to confess that a New Zealander offering up a Yorkshire pudding recipe is probably Not The Done Thing.

Yorkshire puddings are a bit of a source of pride around here, with everyone having their own recipe (often with secret techniques and/or ingredients to guarantee success), and everyone’s mum making undoubtedly the best Yorkshire puddings in existence, and non-Yorkshire TV chefs being regularly scoffed at for daring to offer their own versions. I sort of feel coming in here having only discovered Yorkshire puds in the last fifteen years or so, that even having an opinion on them may be dangerous.

However, I offer in my defence that the SO is both a chef and thoroughly Yorkshire, and I learned to make them from another Yorkshireman who does make excellent puds. So I will pass all responsibility and credit on to them.

Yorkshire puddings as we know them are delightfully light, fluffy concoctions that blossom out of hot oil in the oven and are a non-negotiable aspect of the Sunday roast dinner. They appear in the record around the same time as Welsh rarebit, in the first half of the eighteenth century, but the pudding itself had been around for centuries in the form of “dripping pudding”, so named because it was made in the dripping collected from a roast dinner. It started off as a cheap way to fill hungry tummies, a mix of flour, eggs, and milk that was served with thick gravy and eaten first, so the meat of the main course would go further. Of course, not everyone was lucky enough to have meat for the main course, so the pudding could also be the entire meal.

The original dripping puddings never rose much. However, these days we expect better. According to The Royal Society of Chemistry, “A Yorkshire pudding isn’t a Yorkshire pudding if it is less than four inches tall.” Which is both the trick and the delight of Yorkshire puds, and why everybody has their own secret recipe.

All this lovely rise means you’ll get a nice well inside most puds. This is ideal not just for flooding with gravy on a plate, but also for stuffing with roast beef and horseradish cream, or sautéed mushrooms and spinach, or any number of lovely things and eating as nibbles. The Yorkshireman who originally taught me how to make them used to use half for the roast dinner and the other half for a starter of what he called “Yorkshire salad” – a mix of sliced iceberg lettuce, vinegar, and sugar which was weirdly good.

If you are stuffing them to use as nibbles, keep the fillings fairly dry and provide lots of napkins. They’re not elegant. But they are delicious.

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