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Yorkshire Pudding

A baked batter of milk, eggs, flour, and salt, cooked in beef drippings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Yorkshire Pudding

Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Yorkshire Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Place a piece of beef on sticks in a baking pan to catch the drippings.

  3. Mix the milk, beaten eggs, flour, and salt in a bowl until smooth.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into the pan under the beef 45 minutes before the beef is done.

  2. Let the drippings from the beef fall onto the pudding as it cooks.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set as they bake, giving the pudding its structure and helping it rise.
All-purpose flour
Forms the batter's body, which sets into the pudding's sturdy crumb.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and eggs and makes the batter pourable, adding moisture to the pudding.

The step that matters

Pouring the batter under the beef 45 minutes before it is done. The batter needs the full heat of the oven and the beef drippings to cook quickly. Its trapped steam lifts the batter, so timing the pour to finish with the beef keeps the pudding risen rather than flat.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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