This is a recipe that I have adapted from Jane Grigson’s English Food - I can’t recommend this book highly enough as a wonderful celebration of English cooking. It is true that, as a nation, we did once have something to shout about when it came to food.

Mix together the flour and the seasoning in a mixing bowl, making a well in the centre into which you place the eggs. Add a little of the milk (about half) and begin stirring (from the centre) to make a batter, adding the as much of the remaining milk as you need. The batter should be a creamy consistency but should still pouring consistency.

Make the batter a good hour before you need it, allowing it to settle in the fridge, this allows the air bubbles to escape giving a much smoother batter, resulting in less ‘holely’ puddings.

I prefer to make lots of individual puddings in a cake tin - take your cake tin and add a little dripping or lard (oil will suffice if neither dripping or lard is available) to each of the wells and heat in the oven until the dripping is bubbling. Once hot laddle the batter into each well, it should start to bubble imediately. Place in the oven (at 200C/gas mark 7), on a shelf under the meat, for 25 minutes until the puddings have risen and taken on a even brown colour.

In Grigson’s book there is a wonderful recipe for Yorkshires taken from The Whole Duty of Woman, published in 1737. I have never actually tried this recipe but simply like the language used:

Take a quart of milk, four eggs, and a little salt, make it up into a thick batter with flour like a pancake batter. You must have a good piece of meat at the fire, take a stew-pan and put some dripping in, set it on the fire; when it boils, pour on your pudding; let it bake on the fire till you think it is high enough, then turn a plate upside-down in the dripping pan [i.e. the pan under the joint] that the dripping may not be blackedl set your stew pan on it under the meat, and let the dripping drop on the pudding, and teh heat of the fire come to it, to make it of a fine brown. When your meat is done and sent to table, drain all the fat from your pudding, and set it on the fire again to dry a little; then slide it as dry as you can into a dish, melt some butter, and pour it into a cup, and set it in the middle of the pudding. It is an exceeding good pudding; the gravy of the meat eats well with it.