Lots of good ideas and recipes, I'm drooling! Yorkshire pud's, roast beef & gravy! Oh bliss!!
Being of Brit origin & in my teens when upped & moved to Canada, I grew up with the Brit cooking mystique. Yorkshires, like so many traditional dishes such as Brit sponge cakes, were highly competitive, very temperamental & recipes guarded with awesome ferocity - never written down of course and no visitors in or near the kitchen whilst such delicacies were being prepared.
My mother made sponge cakes that literally floated off the Royal Doulton with hand painted periwinkles cake stand, her yorkshires needed to be instantly held down with a dollop of mashed spuds otherwise they'd float off your plate too. She achieved such things whether she was cooking in Wales using the 300 hundred year old small twin ovens that were built into each side of the large fireplace in the kitchen - no temperature controls of course, the fire heated the ovens & was tamped down or pokered into more heat depending on how the ladylike discrete spit danced on the top of the oven. In England she had a pre WWII gas stove, I don't think it had any temperature controls either, I still have the recipe book that came with it - don't know why, but I do. My word, the recipes in that are hair raising: "Take two lbs of fresh butter; separate a dozen eggs; add two pints of heavy cream....." Anyway agony set in in the kitchen on arrival in Canada. Nothing turned out right, she burnt pots, aprons, tea towels, tea pots & nearly the house down twice - "It was the electric! Why do they use such a thing for cooking?"
An early sponge cake effort was a rock solid flat circle, so hard & grue looking that an evil young teenager fished it out of the "dustbin", made a hole in it &, using some decorative ribbon, hung it at the very top of the ten foot high living room wall in our older style TO house - my mother is very short & terrified of heights. Heh!
Yorkshires: she gave up on those, I'd never taken any interest in cooking, so I had to learn from scratch when I started. I made futile efforts at yorkshires over the years, producing excellent dog biscuits. I've always been one of those cooks that, 'cos I hated washing dishes, wouldn't measure anything if I could possibly avoid it - no measuring cups & spoons, see? "Surprise Cooking" is what we called it. We moved many, many times so constant kitchen & stove styles & types changes. Anyway, I realized eventually that many things such as yorkshires are temperamental and flighty and need to be adjusted & tweaked until they feel at home in whatever kitchen & oven they're in. (Height above sea level in Jasper made major tweaking necessary when baking anything for instance.)
Cutting to the chase: I discovered that yorkshires co-operated beautifully for me (very much a YMMV, in my experience thingy) if, once having established what spot in the oven & temp & which bowl & kitchen temp made them comfy, before chucking my usual ingredients into the bowl, I warmed the milk in the microwave to just above warm - warm enough to warm up to room temp or slightly higher the eggs just removed from the fridge. Whisking the lot the least amount possible & pouring into the smoking hot roast drippings that had been heating up in my wonderful find of a genuine four round yorky Brit yorkshire heavy duty pan, (I had an eight yorky version for when we had guests, which was equally successful but didn't produce such awe inspiring sized yorkies of course). Having finally also mastered yummy gravy, a roast with yorkshire puds & all the trimmings, including roast parsnips in season, at our place became quite popular. :::says I immodestly::: So much so, I have two cranky sisters-in-law who refused to visit again after their children asked them why they didn't make "these round yummy puffy things and gravy without lumps like Auntie -----?". Oh dear! ;-)
Just a tale of Yorkshires & sponge cakes - Brit style.
