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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
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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

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.

Roast the beef

  1. Roast the beef as usual.

Make and bake the Yorkshire pudding

  1. For the Yorkshire pudding, mix equal parts of flour and milk with eggs and a pinch of salt.

  2. Pour the batter into a hot pan with drippings from the beef.

  3. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until puffed and golden.

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. 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. 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and help it puff and set as it bakes.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the risen batter after baking.
Milk
Adds moisture and helps the batter expand into a light, hollow shell.

The step that matters

Pour the batter into a hot pan with drippings. The pan and fat must be very hot before the batter goes in. The sudden heat turns the batter's moisture to steam and starts the rise, so a cool pan 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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