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Toad-In-The-Hole
Mix one pint flour and one egg with milk enough to make a batter (like that for batter-cakes), and a little salt; grease dish well with butter, put in lamb chops, add a little water with pepper and salt, pour batter over it, and bake for one hour.
A plain nineteenth-century American reading of an English pub dish: chops rather than sausages, set in a Yorkshire-pudding batter. Two things decide whether it succeeds — the heat of the dish when the batter goes in, and the fact that the chops need a head start.
- The hinge: get the dish and fat hotThe recipe says only to grease the dish, but batter poured into a cool pan sits and steams instead of rising. Heat the buttered dish, with the chops in it, until the fat is shimmering before the batter goes on.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume in this book: a pint is 2 cups, roughly 9 oz. With one egg and about 2 cups of milk you get a thin pouring batter, looser and less eggy than a modern Yorkshire pudding, which typically uses 3 to 4 eggs to the same flour.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Batter puddings of this type want a hot oven, 425F, at least for the first 20 minutes, then dropping to 375F to finish. A full hour at a genuinely hot heat will dry it; an hour at moderate heat will leave it pale and heavy.
- Brown the chops firstLamb chops laid in raw will render fat into the batter and finish grey. Sear them in the dish, pour off the excess fat, then add the batter. This also supplies the browned fond the dish otherwise lacks.
- The little waterThe water seasoned with pepper and salt is there to keep the chops from sticking and to make a thin gravy underneath. Keep it to two or three tablespoons — more and the batter beneath the meat will not set.
- Resting the batterNot mentioned, but let the mixed batter stand 30 minutes so the flour hydrates. It rises higher and tastes less raw.
- Doneness and yieldThe batter is done when puffed, deep gold and firm at the centre; lamb chops of ordinary thickness will be well past pink by then, which is what the recipe intends. A pint of flour and 4 to 6 chops in a 9x13 dish serves four.
Toad-in-the-hole is an English dish of meat baked in batter, recorded under that name since at least the late eighteenth century, and the name is generally explained as the meat peeping out of holes in the risen pudding — though that explanation is folk tradition rather than documented fact. It began as a way of stretching scraps and cheap cuts with flour, milk and drippings, and older English cookbooks call for steak, kidney, or leftover joints as readily as sausages; the all-sausage version most Britons picture today is a later settling of the form. Its appearance in Buckeye Cookery (1877) shows how thoroughly English batter cookery had travelled into Midwestern American kitchens, where the same batter — flour, egg, milk — did duty for griddle cakes, popovers and this. The instruction to make it "like that for batter-cakes" assumes a cook already familiar with such a batter, who needed no further explanation.