Yorkshire Pudding Day

What the day is

Yorkshire Pudding Day celebrates the batter pudding served with roast beef across Britain. In the United Kingdom it is commonly kept on the first Sunday in February, and it appears on other calendars at other points in the year.

The pudding is three ingredients: eggs, flour and milk, with salt, cooked in very hot fat until it climbs the sides of the tin and sets hollow and crisp.

Origin and background

It began underneath the meat. In open-hearth cooking, a joint turned on a spit dripped fat continuously, and a batter placed in a tin below caught it and cooked in it. Early recipes call it a dripping pudding for exactly that reason, and the name Yorkshire pudding appears in Hannah Glasse's cookery book in 1747.

Its purpose was economic. Meat was expensive and batter was cheap, so in Yorkshire the pudding was traditionally served first, with gravy, before the beef. A household that filled up on pudding needed less beef, and the practice survives in parts of the north as a separate first course rather than a side dish.

The physics is worth knowing because it explains every rule. The pudding rises on steam, not on any raising agent. Water in the batter turns to vapor fast enough to inflate the structure, and the egg protein and starch set around it before it can collapse. Everything that matters follows from that: the fat must be smoking hot when the batter hits it, the oven must be high and stay high, and opening the door drops the temperature and the pudding with it.

How to take part

• Rest the batter, ideally an hour or more. It hydrates the flour and gives a better rise.
• Heat the tin with the fat in it until the fat is shimmering and close to smoking before adding batter.
• Use beef dripping if you have it; otherwise a high smoke point oil. Butter burns.
• Fill each well no more than halfway.
• Do not open the oven for at least twenty minutes, whatever you think you hear.
• Serve immediately with gravy. They deflate within minutes and nothing brings them back.