Popovers, or Yorkshire Pudding

As a kid, popovers were almost as fun to make as beloved to eat. Even then, I preferred bread to sweets, and our old muffin tins made many more popovers than cupcakes.

Fast forward nearly 25 years to my first trip to the United Kingdom, Jason took me to stay at the country pub in his hometown of Hathersage, in Yorkshire. Jason’s father Carl had loved The Rising Sun, and the family had many a Sunday supper in the traditional Tudor building. We spent a week staying in one of the gigantic upstairs bedrooms loaded with Victorian antiques, ending our daily treks through the sheep-filled hillsides of the Brontë sisters at the pub bar with a delicious room-temperature pint of hand-pulled ale and a simple meal of fish and chips or shepherd’s pie.

After one particularly long day of hiking, I was starving, and we decided to eat in the main dining room instead of the bar. I ordered the lamb stew with Yorkshire pudding. Jason explained it was the same as a popover, but made with beef fat, so I was all in, but nothing prepared me for what came next.

The server placed an entire pot of stew in front of me. Next he set an 8 inch soufflé dish on my plate. It held a single enormous popover, which he instructed me to crack open with a ladle and fill the center with spoonfuls of the stew. Reader, I ate the whole damn thing. It was epic.

Since then, I’ve made ‘puds’, as Jason calls them, whenever I make a beef roast, typically only on holidays, and only the normal muffin size. The savory beef drippings make a special version, but even if you just use oil for a basic popover, you can’t go wrong. The key is to ensure the batter rests before cooking, and that the pan is screaming hot when you add the batter and it goes back in the oven before it can cool.

The now-abandoned Rising Sun is scheduled to be torn down in 2026. What a shame.