Cornmeal Yorkshire Pudding: or, Cornbread by any name

I don't know if autumn is here or if we only get a short reprieve from the heat, but we can turn on the oven!

Cornmeal Yorkshire Pudding 2 eggs 1 cup boiling water 1 cup white cornmeal (white if you have it) ½ tsp salt Drippings from roasted meat Heat oven to 350°. Pour the drippings into a 9" round or square pan. Beat the eggs until thoroughly whipped and lemon-colored, set aside. Pour the boiling water over the cornmeal, stirring constantly. Add the salt. Gently mix in the eggs, trying to deflate them as little as possible. Bake until the top springs back when lightly pressed in the center, about 30-35 minutes. While it's baking, baste it 3 times with additional pan drippings. Newspaper clipping, Chicago area, probably 1930s-1940s Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

Apparently they really liked Yorkshire pudding in my great-grandmother's house. Or maybe she frequently roasted large slabs of meat and Yorkshire pudding was an easy standby. Either way, she has two recipes for Yorkshire pudding, carefully nestled together in her binder. 

We have already made what I think is normal Yorkshire pudding, so today we're going to find out what the heck the cornmeal version is.

As I've often mentioned, I started saving beef fat when beef is too expensive to throw any part of it out. So even though we're not buying beef for a while, I still have a lot of what I call "saute-grade" fat in the fridge at any time. This is my term for the meat-filled beef drippings that have a beefy taste and a shorter shelf life. You can't use it for everything, but it's still good enough for things like sauteeing onions. 

The point is, I had drippings (which apparently no Yorkshire pudding is complete without) even though I didn't have any meat roasting in the oven. To this I added paprika, garlic, and a few other basic necessities. I figured if I had spooned the drippings out of a roast-in-progress, there would be seasonings. After our pan was ready, it was time to make the pudding itself. It involved fewer ingredients than I expected. I always thought Yorkshire pudding was very "continental" and perhaps a bit fancy, but this is almost the cheapest batter you can make-- even including the eggs.

I didn't know if whipping the eggs would make a difference, but they actually fluffed the batter a little bit. You could even see the last sloshes of egg foam that didn't quite want to mix in. Had I needed to hand-whisk the eggs, I would have been annoyed at how little the batter changed, but this was only two minutes with an electric mixer.

As a quick aside: I like how aside from a brief encounter with an eggbeater, this was a mindlessly easy recipe. It's perfect for slapping together when you already have a fully-loaded stove to tend to.

The directions say to "baste three times while baking with some of the dripping from roasting pan," but I didn't know how much fat to baste this with. So I put a few little splats on top and hoped I guessed right.

After baking, the pudding bubbled on top where we had basted it. This would subside after a minute or two, but not in my mind. After the suds were gone, this merely looked like bread with well-seasoned splats on top. Which was what it turned out to be.

Those bubbles! Why does it look like I put dish soap on top?

The newspaper called called it "Yorkshire pudding," but this is cornbread. Basting it with seasoned pan drippings did add some nice flavor to it, but it's cornbread. With that said, it's pretty good cornbread. Since it's not raised with baking powder, it doesn't have any chemical taste hiding deep in there. It was just light enough to be nice, but still dense enough for perfect plate-sopping.

In case you're wondering, today's pud is floating on this.