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Good Yorkshire Pudding

A baked batter of eggs, flour, milk, and salt cooked in a hot tin.

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

Good 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 the batter

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

  2. In a bowl, whisk the eggs until well beaten.

  3. Strain the eggs and gradually mix in the flour and salt.

  4. Slowly add the milk until the batter is the consistency of thin cream.

Bake

  1. Place a baking tin under a roasting joint for a few minutes to heat.

  2. Beat the batter briskly just before pouring it into the hot tin.

  3. Bake until the pudding is firm and well-colored, watching to prevent burning.

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

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

Flour and milk 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 and helping it puff.
All-purpose flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the batter body and a firm, sturdy crumb.
Whole milk
Thins the batter to a pourable consistency and adds moisture that turns to steam for rising.

The step that matters

Pouring the batter into the hot tin. The batter must hit a very hot, fat-coated tin so it sizzles and starts setting immediately, which lets the pudding rise dramatically instead of spreading 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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