Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding

Good roast beef begins with the quality of the piece of meat you buy. This should have been aged by the butcher for at least two weeks and perhaps for as long as three. The colour will by then have deepened towards brown, while the meat will have shrunk because of evaporation of internal moisture. Yellowish fat suggests that the animal ate mostly grass, for grain feeding produces whiter fat. If the meat is bright red then it has not been hung for long enough on the carcass to mature.