Yorkshire Pudding Rules
The tin must not gleam. Must never be new.
If there is dried sweat somewhere in its metal
It must be your mother’s. The flour must be strong
And white as the face of Uncle Jack
When he came back from the desert. The eggs
Must come from an allotment. The allotment
Must belong to your father-in-law.
The eggs have to be broken
With one swift movement over the bowl.
If there is dried sweat somewhere in its Pyrex
It must be your mother’s. The milk
Must have been delivered by Colin Leech
At 0430. The fork has to be an old one. The wrist
Must, simply must, ache after the mixing.
The flour must introduce itself to the yolk of the egg.
The egg has to be allowed to talk to the flour.
The milk must dance with them both: foxtrot, then quickstep.
The pepper must be scattered, black on off-white.
The oven has to be hotter than ever.
The lard has to come in a tight white pack.
The lard must almost catch fire in the oven.
The oven door must open and you must shout
JESUS CHRIST as the heat smacks you in the chops.
Follow these rules
And the puddings will rise to heaven
And far beyond.
To attain the necessarily reverential mood for Chocolate Egg Week and its many calorific rituals, try a helping of unapologetically ethnic Yorkshire pudding. It’s from Ian McMillan’s fine, collection-spanning To Fold the Evening Star: New and Selected Poems, published by Carcanet last year.
That the writer and broadcaster is more than an entertainer has always been clear to admirers of both the politics and lyricism of his poems, but he remains an exceptionally good one. A parodic religious text, including at least 18 commandments for the pudding-making ritual and its implements, Yorkshire Pudding Rules takes risks but stays buoyant and even elegant. From the noun/verb double entendre of “Rules” in its title to the final riff on the resurrection of the batter, it maintains a course between the surreal and the realistic, the local and the universal, the affectionate celebration and some quite fierce satire.
It jabs at the cosiness of a northern English version of “the Kale Yaird”, with a particular sharpness in the twice-occurring line about the historic sweat that “must be your mother’s”. The comparison of the flour to Uncle Jack’s face, coming back “strong/and white” from the desert, is funny and startling, and, at the same time, its context points to one of the arguments against national pride. To have come back white-faced from the desert is to have paid some hard, high price for the defence of your realm.
The past is kept alive by such references: the poem is seriously dedicated to ideals of continuity, unwritten, handed down. The rule that the cooking implements mustn’t be new is not at all a dig at tradition. Cooks would usually agree that blackened pans sizzle best, and 50-year-old old forks – I can personally testify – beat pancake batter faster than shiny new ones, thanks to their thicker, longer, farther-apart tines. If McMillan’s poem tests the whole notion of rules, and nips impudently at the power of family and locality, it also recommends the honouring of time and usage, and the value of repeated actions as a kind of husbandry. When in realistic mode, the narrative presents a valuable, perhaps irrecoverable, social landscape where family members owned allotments and shared the produce, and milkmen known by name delivered dawn bottles with precision timing.
McMillan’s prosody is unobtrusively clever. Artfully placed rhythms include unpredictable but essential repetitions of “must” (don’t forget the Yorkshire pronunciation) and the other key words demanded by simple instructions. These commandments are flipped around the lines like batter round the mixing bowl, not hammered into stone. Stresses of five, four and occasionally three per line maintain variety and energy: look, for example, at the masterly mimetic effect in the following 3/5 pairing: “The eggs have to be broken/With one swift movement over the bowl.” Generally, the stress pattern is strong, but it’s not rigid, not over-extended by “rules”.
Once the social-dance metaphor takes over in line 15 the pace speeds up, as if the trope itself lifted the rhythm. The notion that mixing ingredients is encouraging them to mix socially on the dancefloor is a delight. It’s odd but entirely imaginable: the flour clinging wallflower-like to the bowl’s inner edge, and the MC fork gently urging it to join in with the eggs and milk. Slowly at first, then quicker, the beat mutates from that of the “foxtrot” to the “quickstep”. The process of gradual integration is amusingly but somehow truthfully expressed through the “old-fashioned” metaphors of introduction, talking, ballroom dancing and ever faster and more skilful assimilation. It’s a paradigm for happy families and, also, good communities (“black on off-white” in line 18, is suggestive).
The next step is to introduce the essential greasing agent, the lard, deeply English and uncompromising in its “tight white pack”. The rules are becoming dangerous, perhaps. The lard must get so hot before the batter touches it that it’s almost on fire.
We never see the actual cook during the narrative. It could even be a man. The oven seems to open by itself, and the ungendered “shout” is almost disembodied. “The oven door must open and you must shout/ JESUS CHRIST as the heat smacks you in the chops.” Capital letters, but no exclamation mark, underlie the seriousness. It’s very funny but weirdly sacramental. Not at this point, nor later in the envoi’s trinity, does the poem seem blasphemous, or even unconcerned with the sacred. To risk an un-Yorkshire sentimentality, I’d say there was a wealth of love and devotion in the not-quite-smoking air. ’Ave a reyt good Easter, everyone.
If you make it as the Pud Lord intended, you will agree with his prophet: Yorkshire Pudding Rules.
