This month at Shondaland, we’re back again celebrating the individual and collective worlds that exist within this hearty season with our Food, Family, and Traditions series. Whether a personal history of heirloom dumplings, an ode to family meal fail, or how one recipe led to an unbreakable bond, this festive collection of essays is stuffed with sweet stories and tales about people making the holidays uniquely theirs.
I don’t know if I’d call myself an Anglophile exactly, but I’ve always sort of had a thing for England. I grew up watching many a British movie, like A Fish Called Wanda and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. I also watched a lot of Jane Austen adaptations on PBS’ Masterpiece Theatre. So, I’d certainly heard of Yorkshire puddings before. I always assumed it was a dessert of some sort (because “pudding” is a colloquial English term for dessert) and that it did indeed hail from Yorkshire. But it wasn’t until I moved to the cloudy little isle at the eastern edge of the Atlantic that I came face-to-face with this crispy concave dinner roll that often adorns holiday plates and Sunday dinners.
In the summer of 2016, I met a guy (now my husband, but that’s another story) while working on a travel story in southern Portugal. He was very cute, and we had a lovely time together in this idyllic seaside town where he was visiting friends. After dating him long distance — me based in Los Angeles, him near Newcastle in the northeast of England — for some time, I visited him during November: my birthday month and the month of that glorious American holiday, Thanksgiving. It was the first time in my life I wouldn’t be with my own family for the holiday, and I was a bit sad to miss that; mostly, I was just sad that I was going to miss the Thanksgiving meal.
In my adult years, I’ve come to grapple with the whole meaning of Thanksgiving as an ardent supporter of Native lives and the reclamation of their land and heritage in America. Even so, I still love to gather with family and eat turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie. I love the ritual of it, and the smells can instantly transport me to any number of loud, crazy Thanksgivings with my family in Massachusetts, where I grew up.
But there, in England, where only recently have larger cohorts of American immigrants started celebrating Thanksgiving en masse, I thought it would be a good idea to try to re-create some of this culinary joy with my new boyfriend’s family. His mother graciously let me take over her kitchen, but she served as an excellent sous-chef. I think she mentioned adding Yorkshire puddings to the menu at some point, and I (hopefully politely) declined. I needed to stick to my American Thanksgiving meal.
I moved to London in late summer 2017 and spent Christmas with my boyfriend’s family up north that year; the menu was their domain. I sat back and relished not having the stress of a difficult meal to attend to. And when it was time to eat, there on the table were those funky, little, beige, cup-like pancake things still so foreign to me: Yorkshire puddings.
Yorkshire puddings are made of flour, eggs, milk, water, beef drippings, and salt. Thanks to Historic UK, I find out that its origins are not exactly known, but that the general consensus is that it’s a dish associated with the north of England because the prefix “Yorkshire” was first used in a publication by food writer Hannah Glasse in her 1747 book The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy.
The Yorkshire puddings — which were casually referred to as “dripping pudding” — used to be cooked beneath the meal’s primary meat (usually beef) as it roasted on a spit above to let all the juicy fats drip down into the batter, adding crispness and that golden color. The puddings were originally served as a first course with gravy because meat was expensive, and the dough could better fill you up when smaller portions of meat were all that was on offer. But over the last couple of centuries, Yorkshire puddings became a regular meal accompaniment, especially as a staple of the U.K.’s famous Sunday roasts — typically, a meat, roasted potatoes, vegetables, and various sauces and condiments — and on some Christmas dinner tables. Regarding the latter, whether Yorkshire puddings deserve to be there on Christmas can be a touchy subject with some Brits, akin to the sweet potatoes with marshmallow debate in the U.S. (I’m firmly in the no-marshmallow camp, if we’re going there.)
When it came time for my first holiday experience with the dish, I was wary of the oddly shaped, oddly named doughy substance at first. I tasted it, of course, because I will always taste anything (and I do mean anything) at least once, but it didn’t fill me with excitement. I just thought: It’s okay. But I didn’t really need it and would rather pile on some more stuffing, which is bread-based. Plus, I didn’t think it held a candle to my “brown & serve rolls” from Big Y slathered in butter that my family has been using since my late Nana started the tradition.
Valentina Valentini with her husband, Jake, at Christmas dinner.
And so it went — holiday meals and Sunday dinners would come and go, and I would skip the Yorkshire puddings, content that I’d tried it once and that was enough. But for some reason, last Easter, I plopped a small Yorkshire pudding on my piled-high plate, sat down, poured gravy over everything, and dug in. I don’t know; maybe it was the fact that after six years of living in London and seven years celebrating holidays here, I just sort of gave in to the normalcy of having Yorkshire puddings on my plate. Maybe it was the fact that I actually married that British guy who happens to adore Yorkshire puddings. Or maybe it was the fact that I always endured a little side-eye from everyone around the table when I didn’t indulge in the puffy sidepiece. After all this time, was I just holding out in my Americaness because I needed to feel that connection to a place I no longer called home? And if so, to what end? These Brits I was sitting with at each holiday meal were my family too now. And as I closed my mouth around a bite of Yorkshire pudding with a bit of mash and slathered in gravy … and then I did it again, and again … it hit me — these things are really good! I exclaimed as much at the table, and without much fanfare, everyone dryly concurred, “Yeah. We know.”
Once I realized how good these little puds were, I decided it was time to fully embrace them as a part of my new holiday tradition. After that meal, I reached out to my mother-in-law to ask her for her recipe, perhaps with the intention that by adopting her family food secret, I would earn my U.K. family stripes just a little bit more. Further, maybe one day I could even introduce my American family back home to this delectable English treat, thereby bridging cultures across the Atlantic!
Well, my romanticizing was somewhat short-lived: Much to my surprise, my mother-in-law let me know that the tasty Yorkshire puddings they’d been enjoying for years and that I had newly come to love were, in fact … frozen. I hadn’t a clue! I figured there was some treasured family recipe handed down from generations of their northern ancestors. But no — she told me that Aunt Bessie’s frozen Yorkshire puddings, which come 12 to a bag, were the best, and that any supermarket sold their own brand as well.
It was shocking for the first few seconds, but then it all made perfect sense. After all, one of my favorite American sides is Jiffy cornbread … from a box! (I usually pack at least six of them at the bottom of my suitcase whenever I’m back in the U.S. for a visit.) So, while I was momentarily lost in the more fanciful notion of what it would mean to be handed down a family recipe from my husband’s mother, I quickly remembered that it’s not really about the time spent making a dish or the secret ingredients they hold. It’s more about actually enjoying a dish with the people who love it and whom I love. What’s more, a meal like Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter or even a Sunday dinner is already time-consuming, every aspect of the plate labor-intensive. So, why shouldn’t we be adding a damn-fine frozen option to the mix? And if it’s good enough to at last endear me not just to the dish but also to one more aspect of my budding British life, well, then next year, the bag of frozen Yorkshire puddings is happily on me.
Valentina Valentini is a London-based entertainment, travel, and food writer and is also a senior contributor to Shondaland. Elsewhere, she has written for Vanity Fair, Vulture, Variety, Thrillist, Heated, and The Washington Post. Her personal essays can be read in the Los Angeles Times and Longreads, and her tangents and general complaints can be seen on Instagram at @ByValentinaV.
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