After spending time with extravagant teas, massive breakfasts, and hearty suppers filled with Marmaduke Scarlet’s British cookery in “The Little White Horse,” I had a hunch that Tasha Tudor offers a Yorkshire Pudding recipe in her cookbook. Despite looking it up before, I still struggle to remember: what is Yorkshire Pudding?
Flipping through a copy of “The Tasha Tudor Cookbook: Recipes and Reminiscences from Corgi Cottage,” I found she did, in fact, offer a recipe for the distinctive British dish. Tudor’s receipt (she prefers the old-fashioned spelling, along with attire from the 1830s and cooking on the open fire or woodstove), comes from her beloved Scottish nanny, whom she calls Dady. Tudor notes that while out and about in her home state of Vermont, a boy stopped her to say, “I hear you make the best Yorkshire pudding of anybody around.” Makes sense! How many people were making it?
Tudor’s recipe suggests making it in the drippings of your New Year’s roast while the meat rests. She rightly adds, “I can feel the cholesterol-intimidated people squirming in horror. However, once a year will not hurt you, and life is too short not to enjoy a few treats.” The consistency of the Yorkshire Pudding sounds a bit like a Dutch Baby or a German Pancake, fluffy and towering when it comes out of the oven, bready and perhaps chewy upon eating.
As we had a cold snap this week, dramatically falling into delayed fall weather, 40 degrees Fahrenheit (after an absurd stretch of summer weather reaching well into November) with steady and brooding rain, I drooled over the whole cookbook all week, captivated by soups and stews dreamed up to combat the gloom of the British Isle and the long, dark winters of New England.
It’s funny how in cookbooks, you can see the procedures that become staples of an individual cook’s vocabulary. For Tudor, it seems to be thickening. She is in almost every soup and stew calling for thickening agents, added egg yolks carefully incorporated, tablespoons of flour worked into the broth.
The one I cannot wrap my head around is the first receipt on offer in the soup section, Corgi Cottage Soup. When previewing ingredients and directions, generally one has the experience to predict flavors and textures to imagine the end product. I can’t imagine a soup containing both rice and macaroni, lima beans, peas and carrots, baked beans of all things, and all of it thickened with mashed potatoes. What a hearty porridge that would make!
In pictures, Tudor looks to be a waif of a woman, meandering through her extensive garden barefoot in a dress from the 19th century. Did she really tuck into such hearty fare? Living in a drafty old farmhouse, those winters were probably mighty cold, as anyone who has wintered in that part of the country can attest. She also, perhaps, displays the sage approach of the legendary French women who eat heartily at meal times in modest portions, never depriving themselves of the occasional mashed-potato-thickened soup or the annual Yorkshire Pudding doused in greasy sweat from a chunk of roast.
Tudor’s book presupposes farm fresh eggs, milk, chickens and a lush kitchen garden with a variety of fresh and abundant herbs. She writes in the introduction, “I want to stress the importance of using the freshest possible ingredients, and in soups and stews of tasting, tasting, tasting for seasoning. A flat soup is a real disappointment. And don’t look for shortcuts; all good and worthwhile things take time and effort.” There’s the puritanical spirit of New England alive and well! But she’s not wrong.
While you should be using the freshest possible ingredients and at least sprouting some veggies and herbs in a barrel, some of her ingredients are more easily accessible. It’s especially amusing when Tudor’s recipes call for Knorr’s chicken bouillon cubes, for it’s hard to imagine Tudor strolling down the aisle of the local supermarket selecting packaged goods in her 1830s garb.
Like all of Tudor’s books, the volume is filled with pleasant miscellany in intricate borders, pencil and watercolor illustrations of China, gardens, mothers, and children. If you live somewhere cold, this is a heartwarming companion for the winter season. If you live somewhere warm, you can savor its ambience on those rare occasions when its really needed. There are, of course, some recipes for reaping the bounty of the summer garden, but the theme of this book strikes me as cozy, springing as it does from the culinary tradition of the British Isles and an old farmhouse in an often chilly part of the world.
