I used to imagine a Yorkshire pudding like this.
https://goo.gl/images/JTEQGm
Then the internet came along.
I began to understand it’s a bread. I still have no idea why you’d call bread a pudding.
Wiki says it served with roast dinners. The photo provided looks exactly like my roast dinner with yeast Rolls. We buy the brown & serve rolls and use it to sop up the delicious juice from the roast beef.
So is a Yorkshire pudding a dinner roll?
All I know is, you can’t have your pudding if you don’t eat your meat.
OP, pudding also means dessert sometimes too. Mind-blowing.
Yorkshire puddings are very similar to what we americans would call a popover, though I think it’s also very common to make them in tins or pans as opposed to more of a single-serving item.
It is a savory popover, not yeasted, made from what is more like pancake batter. Traditionally made with the rendered fat and drippings from the Sunday roast to eke out the last little bits.
I mean, you linked to wikipedia, which explains it pretty thoroughly.
In modern British usage, “pudding” nowadays is pretty much a synonym for “dessert”, but in olden times it could also refer to savory items. This is an example of such a fossilized usage to refer to a savory pudding.
Pudding is one of those words which seems to have changed over time. Originally it denoted a savoury dish I think, Yorkshire pudding and Black pudding are examples that have kept the original meaning. I’m not sure why or when it came to denote sweet dishes though. It can still be taken to mean both in the UK, perhaps not so much in the US?
You missed out steak and kidney pudding.
Puddings can be sweet or savoury
It seems like they vary a lot.
This looks like rolls on the plate.
But here, I can see why it’s a savory pudding. That looks so good. 
I love stew with crackers or bread. I bake cornbread and crumble it into my beef veg soup a couple times a month. It’s a great and low cost meal.
I think I’d like Yorkshire pudding.
I reckon you would - they are great at soaking up gravy etc.
Based on watching a number of 18th century cooking videos on YouTube, I get the impression that back in that time a “pudding” was basically anything you put in a bag and boil the hell out of for a while.
E.g.: Pudding cloth - Wikipedia
In essence, I think this was sort of like an early version of canning. You put stuff in a container and boil it so that the insides stay fresh. In the case of puddings, usually there was a bread layer surrounding the guts, and the cloth held it together until the shell hardened. The only differences are that you can’t eat the can, but the can does a better job of making the food last.
Once refrigeration and preservatives came along, there was no more need to use this method, so a lot of the recipes ended up losing the outside skin and the sweet branch took on the name “pudding” as a class of food, while some of the recipes that were still made with a pudding cloth kept the word in their names.
Yes, Yorkshire pudding and brown gravy is a meal in itself, even without the roast beef. To make the pudding, you have to pour the batter into a muffin tin liberally greased with beef fat, and stick it in the oven until the batter puffs and turns golden brown. What you end up with is basically thick pancakes in the form of hollow rolls. You then cut or tear them into bitesized chunks that you skewer along with the meat and then dredge through the gravy.
OMG, this is soooooooo good! Throw in some spuds roasted in beef fat and a plate of raw oysters for starters, and you’re livin’ high on the hog (so to speak)!
Wow. YouTube’s been around longer than I thought! 
And now I want Yorkshire pudding.
To the OP, no it is nothing like a bread, nothing like a dinner roll.
The best comparison is to a big pancake but oven cooked in a very hot oven so that you get a nice big rise and some crispy bits to go with a chewy pancake-type bottom.
Done in beef dripping and served with roast potatoes and gravy it forms the basis of the classic british sunday roast dinner.
You can do it in shallow muffin tins or as a big slab in a rectangular roasting tin or anything in between, the shape is irrelevant as the main function is as a gravy delivery device.
The other great yorkshire pudding recipe is to chuck some good quality pork sausage in the bottom of the tin, pour the batter on top and cook in the same way. Toad-in-the-hole.
My MIL (a native of Canada) still makes Yorkshire pudding from the pan drippings. She doesn’t make it in muffin tins, though. I’m pretty sure she just makes the batter and then pours it into the roast drip pan and puts it back in the oven to bake.
No, you fill the hollow centres with gravy first.
I love 'em. I like to make the little ones in muffin tins, as they have a higher proportion of crispy bits to chewy, tender bits. If you’re making a juicy prime rib for dinner, you pour the au jus into the little dips in the tops of each pud.
The pictures linked to upthread give me an idea. The next time I make a steak and mushroom pie (like in winter, when it’s not so freaking hot), I’ll contrive to somehow top it with little individual Yorkshire puds instead of topping it with a pastry crust. Hmm, I wonder how I’ll swing this.
The trouble with doing it that way is that, like potato chips, it ends up being a single serving regardless of how it is cooked. My family is much happier when I take one or two (ok, 6) of the 12 individual servings from the muffin tin vs the one individual serving from the roast tray.
:smack: D’oh! So that’s what I’ve been doing wrong. All this time I’ve been beating my meat. No wonder I have no pudding.
Easily made. You just have to remember to get the oven and the cooking dish (and the cooking fat) as hot as can be before you put the batter in.
If you part-fry (brown) some sausages first, you can put those in before pouring the batter over it, and then you’ll have toad in the hole.
Not really, not even in the tiny little picture you’ve got. Yorkshire puddings are hollow, with a texture almost wholly unlike bread.