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Toad in the Hole
2 cups flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 pound link sausages, 2 eggs, 2 tablespoons melted Crisco, and 3 cups milk. Sift the flour and salt into a basin; beat up eggs well, and after mixing them with the milk and melted Crisco, pour gradually on flour, beating it well with a wooden spoon. When quite smooth, pour it into a well Criscoed fire-proof dish; skin the sausages and lay them in the batter, and bake in a moderate oven for 3/4 of an hour. Serve in small squares arranged neatly overlapping each other on a hot dish.
A workable batter pudding, but the proportions and the oven temperature both belong to an era before high-heat Yorkshire batter became standard. Read the fat and heat notes before you start.
- The hinge: heat the fat firstThe recipe pours batter into a merely greased dish, which gives a dense, pale pudding. Put the fat in the tin and heat it in the oven until it shimmers and is close to smoking, then pour the batter in and return it at once. That thermal shock is what makes the batter climb the sides.
- "Moderate oven"In this period a moderate oven means roughly 350-375F. At that temperature the batter will set but barely rise. Modern practice is 425F for roughly 30-35 minutes, and the recipe's 3/4 hour at that lower heat will give you something closer to a baked pancake.
- CriscoThis book was published to promote Crisco, then a new hydrogenated vegetable shortening. Any neutral high-smoke-point fat works; beef drippings or the fat rendered from the sausages themselves give the best flavour.
- The batter is thinTwo cups flour to three cups milk and only two eggs is a loose, crepe-like batter. A modern Yorkshire-style batter runs closer to equal volumes of flour and milk with three or four eggs. If you want lift rather than custardy density, cut the milk to about two cups and add a third egg.
- Rest the batterNot mentioned here, but 30 minutes at room temperature lets the flour hydrate and the gluten relax. It is widely recommended, though how much it actually improves the rise is disputed.
- Skinning the sausagesRemoving the casings from links leaves you with loose seasoned meat that will poach rather than brown in the batter. Leave the casings on and brown the sausages in the tin first; they render fat you can then use for the batter, and the crust is worth having.
- VesselA "fire-proof dish" of this period would most likely be earthenware or another ovenproof ceramic. A shallow metal roasting tin conducts heat far better and is the better choice for a high oven.
- Yield and servingA pound of sausage and this quantity of batter feeds four to six. Serve immediately: the pudding begins to deflate within a few minutes of leaving the oven, so the tidy overlapping squares are best cut at the table.
Toad in the hole is an English batter pudding of the eighteenth century, when a thick pancake batter baked around whatever meat the household had -- scraps of beef, kidney, pigeon, later sausages -- was a way of making a small amount of protein feed a family. The name is generally explained as the meat peering out of the batter like a toad from its hole, though no early cook has left a record of coining it. The recipe's insistence on Crisco in every step is also period evidence -- A Calendar of Dinners was written to demonstrate the new hydrogenated shortening in every kind of cooking, including dishes that English kitchens had always made with beef dripping.