Yorkshire pudding | Description, Facts, & Origins (2024)

Yorkshire pudding, a baked bread pudding of British origin that is usually served as an accompaniment to roast beef.

The centerpiece of an old-fashioned British Sunday lunch, roast beef was typically cooked on a spit in a fireplace until the introduction of modern ovens to the kitchen. Below the roast was a metal tray into which the fat and beef drippings fell. When the roast was done, a batter of egg, flour, and milk was poured into the tray, rising in the manner of a soufflé and forming a satisfying crunchy crust at its base where it had come into contact with the sizzling beef fat. The resulting pudding was then cut into squares, covered with gravy, and eaten as an appetizer or, less often, served alongside the roast, since it is considered a dish that should be served at once while hot.

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Bread puddings are common throughout Britain, but Yorkshire takes pride of place largely because the dish was first recorded in cookbooks published there in the 18th century. One early cookbook ventured that the crusty character of the dish, born of fiery heat, accorded with the fierce temperament of the people of Yorkshire, but this essentializing was not widely accepted. Even so, bread puddings common in the south of England tend not to be cooked in hot fat and are therefore softer and more truly puddinglike than their northern counterparts. This difference was cause enough for an obscure novelist named Charles Hooton, born in Leeds but resident in London, to sniff in his 1836 novel Adventures of Bilberry Thurland that Yorkshire pudding was “like a leaden pancake,” but an authentic well-cooked Yorkshire pudding is light and airy.

Yorkshire pudding can accompany roast meats other than beef, such as pork or lamb. Today, like a roast, it is usually cooked in an oven rather than in a fireplace, but the ingredients remain constant: meat drippings are added to a metal tray and then heated at high temperature (more than 200 °C [400 °F]) until they are almost smoking, whereupon a batter of flour, milk, and eggs (with salt optional) is poured into the tray and baked for 15–20 minutes. Some modern recipes call for muffin tins to be used in order to make small, individually sized portions rather than a single large one.