Skip to main content
Main

Yorkshire Pudding for Roast Beef

A savory batter made with eggs, milk, flour, and roast beef drippings, baked into a puffed pudding.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,759 recipes. Both carry 1-hexanal, which smells fruit. The science ↓

Yorkshire Pudding for Roast Beef

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.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs until very light.

  2. Add the salt and milk, then pour half a cup of this mixture into the flour and stir to a smooth paste.

  3. Add the remaining mixture and beat well.

Bake

  1. Pour into hot greased pans and bake at 400°F (200°C) for 45 minutes.

  2. Baste with the drippings from the beef.

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.

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 + beeftop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  5. Flour + beeftop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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
Provide structure and lift, setting the batter as it bakes.
All-purpose flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the batter its body and rise.
Milk
Adds moisture that turns to steam, helping the pudding puff up.
Drippings from roast beef
Add fat and flavour, and help the pudding brown and crisp.

The step that matters

Pour into hot greased pans. The batter must hit a very hot, fat-coated pan so it sizzles on contact. This quickly sets the outside and creates the steam that lifts the centre; a cold pan gives a flat, dense result.

“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.

More yorkshire pudding recipes

You might also like