As a life-long Lancastrian ticket holder I thought this clever! {grin}
Yorkshire Pudding
(Courtesy “The Oldie” Mag)
. (Oliver Pritchett)
Isn’t time we waved Ta-Ra to the Yorkshire pudding?
Can’t we just agree that this batter concoction is simply toad-in-the-hole that has been deprived of its rightful sausage? Originally it was an aid to economising, served as a first course with gravy, to fill people up so they weren’t so hungry for the pricey meat that followed.
This echo of hard times up North does not really fit in these days with the comfortable setting of a middle-class Sunday lunch.
There is, of course, a great mystique about the precise recipe for the batter, a game of one-upmanship and an argument about whose Yorkshire pudding was more authentic.
I admit it can be fun to pour gravy into the sunken crater in the middle-but we must act our age and put away childish things like this.
The Yorkshire pudding has turned into a showpiece. How high can you make it rise? It must stand proud on the plate, a unique combination of the brittle and the soggy. (In fact it probably came from the supermarket freezer rather than from a recipe handed down through generations of Cleckheaton grannies.)
Worst of all, this dish has been taken hostage by the purveyors of the “traditional Sunday roast”. Pubs dish up monstrous , teetering towers of roasted batter, like stunted Pisas. The two veg, the sickly potatoes and the meat cower at their base. It dominates! - It comes with everything - beef, lamb, pork and chicken. The whole of Yorkshire must surely wince.
The pub landlord knows that it is, at least, fulfilling its function of dulling the appetite, deceiving us customers into feeling satisfied. So it’s good for profits. As they say, back at the brewery, where there’s batter, there’s brass!
