fft100 wrote:Yorkshire pudding invented in France ? tell me not so.
The links below dont include any such criminal acts.
http://britishfood.about.com/od/england/f/yorkpudds.htm
•The origin of the Yorkshire pudding is, as yet, unknown. There are no cave drawings, hieroglyphics and so far, no-one has unearthed a Roman Yorkshire pudding dish buried beneath the streets of York. The puddings may have been brought to these shores by any of the invading armies across the centuries but unfortunately any evidence of this has yet to be discovered.
•The first ever recorded recipe appears in a book, The Whole Duty of a Woman in 1737 and listed as A Dripping Pudding - the dripping coming from spit-roast meat.
'Make a good batter as for pancakes; put in a hot toss-pan over the fire with a bit of butter to fry the bottom a little then put the pan and butter under a shoulder of mutton, instead of a dripping pan, keeping frequently shaking it by the handle and it will be light and savoury, and fit to take up when your mutton is enough; then turn it in a dish and serve it hot.'
•The next recorded recipe took the strange pudding from local delicacy to become the nation's favorite dish following publication in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by Hannah Glasse in 1747. As one of the most famous food writers of the time, the popularity of the book spread the word of the Yorkshire Pudding. 'It is an exceeding good Pudding, the Gravy of the Meat eats well with it,' states Hannah.
Take a quart of milk, four eggs, and a little salt, make it up into a thick batter with flour, like a pancake batter. You must have a good piece of meat at the fire, take a stew-pan and put some dripping in, set it on the fire, when it boils, pour in your pudding, let it bake on the fire till you think it is high enough, then turn a plate upside-down in the dripping-pan, that the dripping may not be blacked; set your stew-pan on it under your meat, and let the dripping drop on the pudding, and the heat of the fire come to it, to make it of a fine brown. When your meat is done and set to table, drain all the fat from your pudding, and set it on the fire again to dry a little; then slide it as dry as you can into a dish, melt some butter, and pour into a cup, and set in the middle of the pudding. It is an exceeding good pudding, the gravy of the meat eats well with it.
•Mrs Beeton may have been Britain's most famous food writer of the 19th century but her recipe omitted one of the fundamental rules for making Yorkshire pudding - the need for the hottest oven possible. The recipe was further wrong by stating to cook the pudding in advance before placing it under the meat an hour before needed. Yorkshire folk blame her error on her southern origins.
Other links that dont mention France are :
http://martincross.suite101.com/the-con ... ng-a274853
In recent years, there has been some discussion regarding what constitutes a Yorkshire pudding. Even the British Royal Society of Chemistry has lent its august weight to the discussion declaring, from a chemical point of view, that a Yorkshire pudding should have a minimum height of 4 inches (100cm). Yorkshire folk and those of Yorkshire ancestry would tend to disagree with this statement and apply a different chemical formula, if the art of cooking must be reduced to such industrial terms.
The fact is that there are now two forms of Yorkshire pudding – the traditional version made in the roasting pan or large flat casserole dish and the puffier type produced in individual muffin pans and popularized by restaurants. The individual type has a lower fat content but, conversely, is much less filling and therefore does not serve the pudding’s original purpose.