No, I don’t know why this minor British starlet of typical First Year Etonian figure and pudding face thought it would be a good idea to try to raise money for muscular dystrophy by posing naked in a pile of Yorkshire puddings, but you know, god speed and all that. Ain’t no way the two on top are natural; they’ve obviously had some artificial inflation agent used. Baking soda? Yeast? Who knows: the ways of technology are many and varied in these trying times, and a large part of the GDP of Brazil comes from the science of making starlets significantly more inflated than they would be if left to nature.
Those ungodly Brazilo-Yorkacian monstrosities are really besides the point, the point itself being that Yorkshire pudding, too often considered a “fancy add-on” in North America (go on, try to find a restaurant that serves roast beef and yorkshire pud for less than $15), is really just a very sensible and quite tasty way of throwing some appetizing ballast down the stomach of your friendly neighborhood coal miner so that he doesn’t walk away from the table hungry and pull a frickin’ Zoolander down in the mines the next day.
So here’s what you do if you do have meat and can make gravy, but don’t have rice, pasta, or potatoes: you make these dead-simple popover variants, which costs you about $2 for enough to feed a small troupe of coal miners and fifteen extras from a James Herriot book, and you tell everyone it’s a “special occasion” which, once they taste them, they will believe. You will need gravy, though, as they are, like the Sahara Desert, lovely WITH add-ons but quite bleak without.
Then you sit smugly and consider how much smarter you are than Catherine Tyldesley, because you actually get to EAT these delicious little toasty poofs of gravy-sopping goodness. In fact, you have to eat them, because they don’t keep worth beans. God knows I’ve tried.
It’s also surprisingly adaptable recipe (don’t worry if it looks deformed; it always looks deformed) forming the basis of toad in the hole, German pancakes, and quite a number of other carb-heavy substrates. There’s a stunningly simple and infinitely adaptable recipe here, and note the small, easily overlooked detail that you must make these in a metal muffin pan, not a pyrex or fancy silicone one, because it won’t climb up the walls the way it should if you do that.
Hi, raincoaster. I enjoyed your very titillating post. Did the starlet think she was a Sunday roast? Just another piece of meat, I guess….
Thank you for linking to my own post on my grandmother’s recipe for Yorkshire Pud. She’d have been both scandalized and amused by the association. Your link gave me the chance to discover the wacky world of He-Who-Is-Not-Manolo-Blahnik.
Dan
Comment by IslandEAT — November 10, 2010 @ 4:01 pm
She looks awfully pale, for a roast. I say we put her back in the oven till she’s nice and brown, like Snooki!
And thanks for the great post, Dan. Personal stories along with recipes make the best reading!
Comment by raincoaster — November 10, 2010 @ 6:18 pm
So, here’s the recipe: “To make the batter, heap a proper tablespoon with as much plain flour as you can possibly get on it, twice. To this add two large eggs, a pinch of salt and then gradually beat in milk until the batter is the same consistency as single cream.”
Can someone translate this into american english? Heap means…? Proper tablespoon of what? What is single cream?
I think I’ll stick with the Alton Brown method, thanks.
Comment by eowyn_2 — November 12, 2010 @ 6:46 am
http://google.co.uk
Comment by raincoaster — November 12, 2010 @ 12:45 pm