Things I Love About London, Part IX: Yorkshire Pudding

Since my time in London is rapidly coming to an end (less than a month now), I figured I should do a few final frantic blog posts on things I love about London. I often feel that there are too many to count, but these are a few I have been meaning to blog about for awhile.

Things I Love About London, Part IX : Yorkshire Pudding

You may have noticed that quite a few of my Things I Miss About America blogs revolve around food, but very few of my Things I Love About London blogs do the same. That’s because, quite simply, I find British food horrible. Everything is rather flavourless, deep fried, and overcooked. Yesterday, I saw a sign outside a restaurant advertising boiled bacon. Only the British could manage to ruin something as amazingly delicious as bacon.

There is one huge exception to my dislike of British food. That is the little bit of heaven that is known as Yorkshire Pudding. Now, let me start off by explaining that in England, pudding can refer to either a sweet or savoury bread-based product. Also, in England, all desserts are referred to by the general term “pudding.” So, it can be a bit confusing. What we (the Americans) know as pudding (aka- the custard-like deliciousness that is always associated with Bill Cosby in my mind) doesn’t really exist here- much to my disdain.

In the case of Yorkshire Pudding, “pudding” refers to a savoury bread-like product that is served with the main part of a meal. It originated in the Yorshire region of England (hence the name) in the 1700s because cooks wanted to make use of the leftover meat-droppings at the bottom of the pan after cooking a roast. They combined these droppings with batter, and Yorshire Pudding was born.

As these cooks found out, and I now know, batter + animal fat/juices = AMAZING. Today, Yorkshire Pudding is most often served with a Sunday Roast (see future blog post). If you’re lucky, it will come in little bowl shapes and be filled with gravy (*drool*). I should have let bobby blog on this topic, because he has actually made Yorkshire Pudding for me from scratch on a number of occasions. How something can taste so amazingly delicious and buttery without actually using any butter is beyond me.

Yorkshire Pudding may be the only culinary import I bring back to America.