Biography
Get that oven pre-heated while we trace the long association between the English and beef, and find out how Yorkshire pudding became the meat's best friend.
The Basics
Celebrated in song, pub menus and Euro-caricature, roast beef is the Englishman’s essential sustenance, his privilege and his birthright. The meat is what stiffens his sinews, the gravy flows in his veins, and the Yorkshire pudding that goes with it is fashioned from the featherlight batter of liberty. Or something like that.
Roast Beef of Old England
Probably more than any other nation in history, England has absorbed gastronomic influences from all over the known world. Dozens of different ethnic cuisines compete for attention on our city high streets, and a glance at the ready meals on supermarket shelves reveals that our tastes have become truly global. That doesn’t mean, however, that we have entirely left behind the dishes on which our own (often maligned) food culture was founded. Of these, none is more richly symbolic than every non-vegetarian’s favourite Sunday dinner – roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.
The Yorkshire Pudding
Apart from horseradish sauce, hearty gravy and roast potatoes, the other indispensable accompaniment to roast beef is Yorkshire pudding. Made either in individual servings or as one large pudding for cutting up like a pie, this is a puffed-up cake of batter baked in fat in a red-hot oven. In the past, the Yorkshires were more than a decorative adjunct to the meat, though. They were often eaten – and still are in some homes – as a separate course.
