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Yorkshire Pudding for Roast Beef

A baked batter made from milk, eggs, flour, and salt, served with roast beef.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 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. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

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

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

Bake and serve

  1. Pour off the fat from the top of the gravy, leaving the gravy in the pan.

  2. Pour the batter into the pan with the gravy.

  3. Bake for 20-30 minutes until puffed and golden.

  4. Serve cut into squares 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. 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
Provide structure and help the batter rise and set as it bakes.
Flour
Forms the batter's structure, which sets as the pudding bakes.
Milk
Adds moisture and helps the batter steam and puff in the hot oven.

The step that matters

Pour the batter into the hot fat. The batter must go into hot fat from the gravy pan so it sears on contact and starts to rise quickly. Pouring into cool or insufficiently heated fat gives a dense, flat pudding instead of a well-risen one.

“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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