February 3: British Yorkshire pudding day

British Yorkshire pudding Day First Sunday in February in the UK. In the US, there is a National Yorkshire Pudding Day on 13 October.

1. For the benefit of non-British readers, Yorkshire pudding is a side dish made from Eggs, flour, and Milk or Water, and can be served in any number of ways, both savoury and sweet, but is traditionally served with the Sunday roast dinner.
2. It's most associated with roast beef, but can be served with any roast meat. The British dish "Toad in the Hole" is sausages cooked inside a Yorkshire pudding. It can be served as dessert, too, with fruit and cream and even chocolate sauce made from Mars bars.
3. The origins of Yorkshire pudding are lost in the mists of time. The word "pudding" tends to be associated with dessert these days, but in old English it was a meat dish, similar to a sausage. The word in this usage survives today in black pudding or white pudding. The dish was traditionally cooked in the fat from roasting meat, or "dripping" and was called "dripping pudding". Or you might choose to believe that it was invented by Doctor Who - the 11th Doctor, Matt Smith, claimed to have invented Yorkshire pudding in one episode of the show.
4. If such things were eaten throughout England, why Yorkshire? One theory is that the coal industry in Yorkshire meant people could have bigger and hotter fires and could produce crispier puddings.
5. It was traditional to serve this dish as a starter, and is often said to be a trick to fill people up so they don't eat so much of the more expensive meat course. Poor people often didn't have meat at all, and would eat Yorkshire pudding instead of meat.
6. One of the earliest recipes for such a pudding was published in a book called The Whole Duty of a Woman, published in 1737. Ten years later, Hannah Glasse published her own version in The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy in 1747. It was Hannah Glasse who first described it as a "Yorkshire" pudding.
7. In 2008 the Royal Society of Chemistry declared that "A Yorkshire pudding isn't a Yorkshire pudding if it is less than four inches tall".
8. Outside of Yorkshire, the town which consumes the most Yorkshires is Newcastle Upon Tyne.
9. The largest Yorkshire pudding ever made was 500 feet (46.46 square metres) in area and was made in 1996 by members of Skipton Round Table. Skipton is in Yorkshire. Another record associated with Yorkshire pudding is the 2009 record for the largest roast dinner. 1,632 people tucked in to that, and Yorkshire pudding was naturally included.
10. 20 million Yorkshire puddings are made by Aunt Bessies every week for those who can't be bothered to make them from scratch. 60,000 people do online searches for the recipe each month, and there is even a web site dedicated to the dish: http://www.yorkshirepudd.co.uk/

See also: Yorkshire 

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