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Roast Beef, with Yorkshire Pudding

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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 beef

  1. Prepare the beef roast on a rack of clean sticks in a dripping pan.

  2. Pour boiling water over the beef when placing it in the oven.

  3. Baste the beef often and ensure the fat does not scorch.

Make the batter

  1. About 45 minutes before the beef is done, mix the Yorkshire pudding batter.

  2. Combine milk, beaten egg whites, beaten egg yolks, flour, and salt in a bowl.

  3. Mix the batter quickly.

Bake and serve

  1. Remove excess fat from the dripping pan, leaving enough to prevent sticking.

  2. Pour the batter into the pan and continue roasting the beef, allowing drippings to fall onto the pudding.

  3. Ensure the oven is hot at this point.

  4. Baste the meat with the drippings you removed earlier.

  5. Cut the pudding into squares and serve around the meat.

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + eggtop 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).

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

Beef roast
Forms the main savoury centrepiece and is the source of drippings that flavour the pudding.
Eggs
Their proteins set the batter and help it rise and hold its structure as it bakes.
All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the batter, which sets around the air and steam as it bakes.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness to the batter, helping it bake up tender and browned.

The step that matters

Keep the oven hot when the batter goes in. A very hot oven and hot fat create steam quickly, lifting the batter so it puffs. If the oven is cool, the batter spreads and turns dense instead of rising.

“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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