Yorkshire pudding: what it is, what to order and what to avoid

Overview

A Yorkshire pudding is not a pudding in the American sense and not a bread. It is a thin batter of flour, eggs and milk poured into fat that is already smoking hot, and baked until it rises up the sides of the tin into something crisp at the rim and soft, almost custardy, at the base. The heat of the fat is the whole technique: batter poured into cool fat comes out flat and greasy, and no amount of oven time rescues it.

It belongs to the whole county rather than to York in particular, and it is honest to say so: this is the city’s dish in the way it is every Yorkshire town’s dish. What York has is the claim of being the county’s historic capital, and plenty of pubs that serve a Sunday roast.

The origin is better documented than most. An anonymous household manual of 1737 gives a recipe for a “dripping pudding”, baked under meat roasting on a spit so the fat ran down into it. A decade later Hannah Glasse printed a version in her cookbook and called it a Yorkshire pudding, the earliest known use of the name in print. Glasse was not from the county, and why she gave the dish its name is not recorded.

The famous story is the economical one: that in poorer households the pudding came first, on its own with gravy, so that everyone was full before the expensive meat arrived. It is a widely repeated family tradition and plausibly true of many kitchens, but it is told rather than documented, and it should be read as memory rather than history.

There is no protected designation. Anyone, anywhere, can sell anything under the name, which is why the second half of this article exists.

What to order

In practice the pudding arrives as part of a Sunday roast: roast meat, roast potatoes, vegetables and gravy, with one or two puddings on top. Beef is the traditional pairing, because the batter was cooked in beef dripping, but pubs now put them on every roast, including chicken, pork, lamb and the vegetarian option. Nobody will think it odd to ask for one on a plate that did not come with it.

The words worth knowing:

• Yorkshires or Yorkies — the plural as it is spoken. “Can I get extra Yorkshires” is an ordinary request, and many places will add them, sometimes at a small supplement.
• individual puddings — the familiar tall, cupped shape, baked in a tin of small wells. This is the default almost everywhere.
• a tray pudding — baked in one large tin and cut into squares. Flatter, crisper at the edges, and the older home form; less common on a menu, and a good sign when it is.
• giant Yorkshire — a single pudding the size of a plate, used as a bowl and filled with roast, sausages or stew. It is mostly a pub dish rather than the home form, and a perfectly good lunch.
• toad in the hole — sausages baked inside the same batter, usually with onion gravy. Usually a weekday dish rather than a Sunday one.
• with onion gravy — on a menu, often a sign the pudding is being offered on its own as a starter, the closest a restaurant gets to the old first-course habit.

What marks you out, harmlessly, is leaving the pudding until last or eating it dry. It is there to hold gravy: the hollow is the point, and pouring into it is expected. Some people in the county also eat a leftover pudding sweet, with jam or syrup; you are unlikely to be offered that, but it is not a joke if someone mentions it.

What to avoid

The thing to avoid is not a bad pudding but a bought one. Frozen, factory-baked puddings are cheap, quick to reheat and very widely used, including in pubs that do everything else properly, so the question is always whether yours was made that morning.

A fresh pudding is irregular. Each one rises a little differently, with a crisp, uneven rim, a darker crust where it touched the tin and a soft, slightly damp base. A frozen one gives itself away by being identical to its neighbor: the same height, the same pale even color, the same dry, bready texture all the way through, and a rim that bends rather than cracks.

The other giveaway is the hours. Batter puddings are at their best within minutes of the oven and collapse quickly, so a kitchen baking them fresh tends to bake in batches through Sunday lunch. A pudding that is leathery and chewy rather than crisp has usually been sitting under a heat lamp, which is the risk of arriving late in the afternoon.

Look at the words on the board. “Homemade Yorkshire puddings” is written precisely because the frozen kind is so common, and a pub that bothers to say it usually means it. A carvery counter, where you queue and the puddings wait in a heated tray beside the meat, is the setting where a stale or reheated one is most likely.

And watch the gravy, because it is half the dish. Gravy made from the roasting juices is darker and tastes of the meat; gravy from granules is glossy, uniform and salty, and it tends to travel with the frozen pudding.

Practicalities

Sunday is the day that matters, and lunch is the meal: roasts are usually served from around midday into the afternoon, and many pubs stop when the meat runs out rather than at a fixed hour. Book for Sunday lunch at any well-regarded pub, where visitors and local families are competing for the same tables. An early sitting gets the first batch of puddings.

Beef is usually the most expensive roast on the board. A roast priced well below the local pubs is usually a carvery or a chain, which is where the frozen pudding is most at home; at one priced well above them, you are generally paying for better beef rather than a better pudding.

On other days of the week the pudding is still around, as a side, as toad in the hole or as a giant filled pudding at lunch, but the roast itself is a Sunday institution and the weekday versions are more likely to have come out of a freezer. If your days in York do not include a Sunday, a pub that writes “homemade” on a weekday board is still the one to choose.

Eat it first, or at least eat it before it cools. The difference between a pudding at five minutes and at twenty is the difference between crisp and rubber.