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Roast Beef with Yorkshire Pudding

A roast beef served with Yorkshire pudding made from milk, eggs, flour, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Beef and milk 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 ↓

Roast Beef with Yorkshire Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the milk, beaten eggs, salt, and flour until smooth.

Roast and bake

  1. Set the beef on a rack or muffin rings in a roasting pan.

  2. Roast the beef until done, about 1 hour.

  3. Pour the mixture into the pan under the meat during the last hour of roasting.

Serve

  1. Cut the Yorkshire pudding into pieces and serve with the roast.

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

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

  5. Beef + flourtop 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.
Flour
Forms the gluten framework that gives the pudding its body.
Milk
Adds moisture and helps the batter steam and puff in the hot pan.

The step that matters

Pour the batter under the meat during the last hour of roasting. The batter must go into a very hot pan with hot beef fat so it sets quickly and puffs. A cold or cool pan, or a batter that sits too long, produces a flat, dense pudding.

“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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