Yorkshire Pudding

When speaking about pudding, the first thing that comes to mind is a kind of dessert. But in the case of Yorkshire Pudding, it is rarely served as such. Made of milk, flour, eggs and salt, it is usually basted with gravy to accompany roast meet.

As its name indicates, the Yorkshire pudding originated in Yorkshire, a historic county of Northern England. The first reference to this dish is to be found in a book of 1737: The Whole Duty of a Woman. The people made use of the fat in the dripping pan to cook a pudding. The recipe was the same as now, but it was then called dripping pudding (“dripping” comes from spit-roast meat). Ten years later, it was renamed “Yorkshire pudding” by Hannah Glasse, a famous English cookery writer of the 18^th century, in her book The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. The popularity of the book was such that it spread the word of the Yorkshire Pudding. The two versions were the same, except that the one of 1737 was flatter than the puffy version known today. And this is apparently an important thing. Actually, in 2008, the Royal Society of Chemistry edited a ruling concerning the Yorkshire Pudding. This professional association of the United Kingdom then wrote that “a Yorkshire pudding isn't a Yorkshire pudding if it is less than four inches tall”.

Nowadays, this particular type of pudding generally accompanies the main course. It goes well together with roast beef, chicken or any dish with sauce. Gravy (meat juice) is actually considered by the British as the best accompaniment to the Yorkshire Pudding. Traditionally, however, it was eaten with onion juice as a starter. It is often said that it was in order to stuff the guests with something cheap so that they would eat less of the more expensive dishes that followed. Sometimes it is also served as a snack with jam or with jam and ice cream, in the common understanding of “pudding”.

Last but not least, you can here find a recipe by the famous cook Jamie Oliver:

Ingredients (12 puddings)

- 3 eggs

- 115 g plain flour

- 1 pinch sea salt

- 285 ml milk

- 12 tablespoons vegetable oil

Directions

1. Whisk the eggs, flour, salt, and milk together really well in a bowl to make your batter. Pour the batter into a jug, and let it sit for 30 minutes before you use it.

2. Turn your oven up to the highest setting, and place a 12 cup muffin tray in the oven to heat up for 5 minutes.

3. Place 1 tb of oil in each muffin hole, and put the tray back into the oven and heat until oil is very hot.

4. Open oven door, slide the tray half out, and carefully pour the batter into the muffin holes.

5. Close the door and cook for 15 minutes without opening the oven door.

6. Serve immediately.

Now that you know more about Yorkshire pudding and that you are in possession of the recipe by the famous British chef, you can finally try the staple of the British Sunday lunch yourself.

Caroline Laurent & Sophie Trigaux

Paul McCarthy

Paul McCarthy is a contemporary artist who was born in 1945 in Salt Lake City, in the US. He is a controversial artist, constantly pushing the boundaries. 

Paul McCarthy is used to playing on illusions and cultural myths. He often takes aim at famous American myths, fantastical characters, real-world political figures, icons and attacks their innocence and purity. The human figure is a constant element in his work. It can be whether in the form of bodies in action, satirical caricatures or even as the residue of a private ritual. His work takes form in a wide variety of media: photography, painting, performance, sculpture, video, installation and drawing.                    

Paul McCarthy has been influenced by the Viennese Actionism. This movement, active in the ‘60s and the ‘70s, replaced canvas with bodies, and paint with primal substances of life, such as blood, sperm and excrements. However, McCarthy doesn’t use such bodily fluids but replaces them with ketchup, mayonnaise and chocolate sauce. Artists such as Yves Klein and Jackson Pollock have also influenced Paul McCarthy.

Two major pieces of work are Painter and Santa Claus.  

Firstly, Painter is a video performance realized in 1995 in which Paul McCarthy plays the role of a painter who he is going to ridicule: Willem de Kooning. Willem de Kooning was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist. He painted in a style known as ‘Action Painting’ in which paint is spontaneously splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied. The video describes de Kooning's senility and late paintings. In this video, Paul McCarthy, dressed up as a clown, with a bulbous nose, giant hands and wearing a curly blonde wig, tries to teach his audience about painting. He works in an oversized setting, slashing paint onto a canvas thanks to a giant paintbrush. The painter mumbles and cries “You can’t do it anymore, you can’t do it anymore”. And later: “I can’t do this anymore”. By saying this, he means painting, art-making, he may mean life. At the end, the artist gets up on a table, pulls down his pants and a collector sniffs at his bare ass, so McCarthy’s own. The collector finds it nice. Painter is said to be a hilarious satire of Abstract Expressionists and of the world of art in general.

Secondly, Santa Claus, also known as the “Buttplug Gnome”, is a sculpture of six metres high which depicts Santa Claus himself, brandishing in the right hand a butt plug and dangling the Father Christmas’s traditional bell in the left one. This statue is the ideal figure for McCarthy’s social criticism: Santa Claus is the perfect symbol of sentimentality and convivial good cheer, of commercial success and consumerism. This sculpture, made in 2001, was originally ordered by the city of Rotterdam. Because people saw it as an obscene provocation, insulting their values and standards, it has been moved several times before being finally placed in the square 'Eendrachtsplein". Chocolate replicas of the sculpture are available.

Marie-Jeanne Bleuzet & Justine Olivier

Antony Gormley

Antony Gormley is a British sculptor born in 1950. He studied archaeology, anthropology and the history of art and then he made a postgraduate course in sculpture. He is internationally well-known and he has been made an Officer of the British Empire.

The central subject of his art is the human body and his work’s aim is to make sculptures which enclose a particular body to identify a common condition to all human beings. That is why he uses his own experiences of life which he transforms into a test ground to realize a collective projection.




One of his most famous works is Event Horizon (2007). It is a public sculpture consisting of 31 reproductions of Gormley’s body. These statues were first placed on top of buildings in London before moving to New-York City in 2010. There, the 27 fiberglass figures have been placed on top of building and the four cast irons on the ground in Madison Square Park.

This work’s aim is that people looking at it transfer their physical experience of the sculpture on the ground into the one you can see on the horizon, which is unreachable.
Furthermore, those bodies are a metaphor meant to get viewers thinking about the urban life and all its associations such as alienation, ambition, anonymity and fame. It has also the ambition to encourage people to look around them by re-assessing their own position in the world.
 

The second sculpture is called Angel of the North. It is made out of steel, the construction began in 1994 and was finished in 1998. It represents an angel, 20 metres tall with 54 metres wingspan, standing on a hill in England.
Gormley realized an angel because it has, according to him, three functions. Firstly, a historic one to remind people this site was before a mine where people lived in poor conditions. Secondly, it expresses the human transition from the industrial to the information age. Finally, the angel represents our hopes and fears.
 

This sculpture is one of the most viewed pieces of art in the world, seen by more than one person every second because of its position near a main motorway and last but not least,  it is presumed to last for more than 100 years.


Séverine Alaime and Sarah Vercauteren