A bit of better batter

Golden, puffy and crisp, Yorkshires are the crowning glory of the Sunday roast. Flora Watkins tucks in

Yorkshire pudding with turkey or lamb? Why not, asks Flora Watkins

PITY the poor food writer who takes on the Yorkshire pudding. Few dishes arouse such heightened passions as this humble staple of flour, eggs and milk, which was originally served before the meat course to blunt the appetite.

A flurry of letters to the Editor was prompted by Simon Hopkinson’s advice to cook the Yorkshires at the top of a hot oven (‘The art of the great British Sunday roast’, March 28). Au contraire, declared one reader, insisting that the only way to cook them is under the joint, so the juices flavour the pudding. Others maintained that a single, large tray should be used.

One gentleman eulogised his late mother’s Sunday luncheon, which consisted of Yorkshire pudding three ways: firstly, with onion gravy, next with the meat course and, finally, served as a pudding with raspberry vinegar.

‘Yorkshire puddings may not have been invented in God’s own country’

Before we drift into the realms of Monty Python’s ‘Yorkshiremen’ sketch, I should issue the following disclaimer: I am a southerner. Mr Hopkinson is a Lancastrian. However— and, already, I hear the thud of a heavy postbag landing on the Editor’s desk—it transpires that Yorkshire puddings may not, in fact, have been invented in God’s own country.

In her seminal work English Food (1974), Jane Grigson noted that the first mention of Yorkshire pudding appeared in a bestselling cookbook of 1747, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. Its author, Hannah Glasse, was born in London, of Northumberland stock. Mrs Glasse advocated placing the pudding under the joint to catch the

drips, but she was writing at a time when meat was roasted on a spit. Today’s leading chefs—and many a good home cook—know that producing a Yorkshire as golden and puffed up as a coronation crown requires a high shelf in a hot oven.

‘Whack the oven up at the end’ when the beef is resting, advises Mr Hopkinson, who leaves the potatoes at the bottom to crisp up. However, Adam Byatt, of Michelin-starred Trinity in Clapham, south-west London,

and its younger sibling, Bistro Union, maintains that the Yorkshires should go in on their own. ‘They don’t like the oven being open and they don’t like the moisture from other things,’ he explains.

Mr Byatt is something of an authority on the subject. As an apprentice chef at Claridge’s, his job was to make the Yorkshires to accompany the roast rib of beef, wheeled around resplendent on the trolley every Sunday (see box for recipe).

Fellow Michelin-star holder Tommy Banks, of The Black Swan at Oldstead, in the North York Moors National Park, concurs that heat is what’s needed. Mr Banks, whose family has farmed in the area for generations, puts his Yorkshires in at 220˚C, then turns the oven down to 180˚C to finish, so they don’t burn on top. ‘They need to be golden brown and soft and a bit eggy in the middle,’ he muses. Use individual muffin trays, otherwise ‘they’ll be too big and will dry out before they’re cooked’, and get the fat ‘screamingly hot’.

Mr Hopkinson gets quite cross when he hears of people using goose fat. ‘It’s become a thing,’ he sighs. He’ll use a bit of beef dripping, as will Mr Banks, although Mr Byatt prefers vegetable oil.

It transpires that the association of beef with Yorkshire pudding is relatively recent. In 1737, 10 years before Mrs Glasse’s recipe, the author of The Whole Duty of Woman was instructing readers to put a batter pudding beneath a joint of mutton. At Bistro Union, Yorkshire puddings are served with roast pork, chicken and lamb, as well as beef.

‘I have it at Christmas, too, which is a bit debatable,’ confesses Mr Byatt. Yorkshire puddings with turkey? With apologies to the Editor, this debate will run and run.