Sunday, March 3, 2013

Arise!; or, Yorkshire Pudding.

Yet again, the Swedish-Cantabrigian food blog has been dormant for a (large but still finite) number of months. If the last previous entry had later than August, at least the postdoctoral research fellow could have claimed to have been hibernating--but more than six months would have to be considered somewhat excessive.

So what has happened in the meantime, after the harvest of the last of the beans? Well, our blogger has moved to a new house; same neighborhood, but new and improved, and with a housemate.  He has joined a Cambridge college and occasionally eats there, and enjoys informal after-dinner conversations with fellows and students over coffee, in leather armchairs. He has written papers and has taught a class to students doing the so-called Part III. He still listens to a lot of music and gets stuck on pretentious reading projects. New crops have been planted, and will no doubt be documented to excess over the course of their growing period, and when they get turned into meals.

Occasionally, when he is not doing math, the Cantabrigian Swede-Pole cooks. Sometimes he teams up with his housemate and invites friends over for dinner, and sometimes such dinners occur on Sunday and require traditional delights, such as the legendary Yorkshire Pudding. Here is how to make them in your own home, be it in Yorkshire, Sweden, Oklahoma, or elsewhere.

Ingredients:

-250ml of white all-purpose flour
-200ml of milk (milkman-delivered)
-4 eggs

-salt & pepper
-vegetable oil




Set the oven to 230C/440F. Using a measuring cup, fill a plastic bowl with 250ml of flour. Add four eggs one after the other, while mixing flour and egg in the process. Add the milk, and beat the combined ingredients into a batter. Keep beating the mix until it is completely smooth. Season with salt and pepper.

After the batter is ready, take out a muffin tin, and pour a little vegetable oil into each hole. (Yorkshire pudding was allegedly originally known as dripping pudding and made using dripping from the roast it gets served with.) Slide the muffin tin into the oven for a couple of minutes to heat up the oil. The trick is to make sure the tin (and the oil) is very hot. In the meantime, transfer the batter to a jug for easy pouring. Once you're satisfied that the oil is hot enough, take out the tin and carefully fill each hole roughly 2/3 of the way up with batter. And into the oven the proto-puddings go.



Watch the spectacle of the rising pudding: first, not much happens, but soon they start gaining in volume, and escape, mushroom-like, out of the confinement of the tin pits in which they are trapped. Amazingly, the batter doesn't simply overflow--it just keeps on risin'. Eventually, this process terminates, and the little puddings concentrate on getting their tan on.

Now, by decree of the Royal Society of Chemists, a candidate pudding must achieve a height of at least 4 inches/10cm in order to be awarded the prefix "Yorkshire".  Hence, as you remove the puddings from the oven after approximately 7 minutes, keep your fingers crossed you will be eating a genuine Yorkshire delight. (If you are very pedantic, and concerned about quality control, measure each individual pudding before allowing it to join you at the table. Your friends may, however, think you are insane.)

In any case, serve the puddings warm, with lots of yummy gravy. Don't forget roast potatoes and plenty of vegetables!





Serving suggestions: "Blue" by Joni Mitchell on the side; a bottle of Simcoe IPA by Kernel Brewery in London.