When William Hogarth painted an English kitchen porter carrying a side of beef into an English hostelry in the French port of Calais, under the envious, half-starved gazes of French soldiers, he was making a point about the honest-to-goodness heartiness of the English diet. We are what we eat, and have been ever since we learned how to cook in Palaeolithic times.

The Yorkshire pudding that goes with the beef was once a way of soaking up the drippings from spit-roast meat, and is still eaten in some parts of the country as a separate course. It is one of those recipes that is never successfully tampered with. Unless freshly made and eaten straight away, it just isn’t Yorkshire pudding.