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Toad in the Hole
Mix a pinch of salt with four large table-spoonfuls of flour. Beat this to a smooth paste with two well-beaten eggs, and add two-thirds of a pint of milk. The milk should be added very gradually, and the pudding should be well beaten so that there are no lumps, and it should be of the consistency of very thick cream. Cut a pound and a half of beefsteak and one or two sheep's kidneys, or a quarter of a pound of ox kidney, into pieces convenient for serving. Lay them at the bottom of a hot buttered dish, and pour the batter over them. Bake in a brisk oven. The batter will be better if it is made an hour or two before it is wanted, but it should be beaten up again at the last moment before it is poured over the meat. Mutton chops, sausages, or a stuffed fowl may be substituted for the steak and kidney, or a few mushrooms or oysters may be put with the meat, or even a small quantity of minced shallot. The remains of cold meat also may be served in this way, and will be found to be very good, though, of course, not so good as when fresh meat only is used. Some cooks fry the meat lightly, to brown it a little, before putting it into the dish. Time to bake, from one hour and a half to two hours. Probable cost, if made with steak, 2s. 10d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian toad in the hole is a meat pudding first and a batter second: the steak and kidney cook through inside the batter over a long bake, which is why the timing looks so extreme against a modern sausage version.
- The batter proportions"Four large table-spoonfuls of flour" is vague; four tablespoons measured level is only about 1 oz, though heaped Victorian spoonfuls in a batter of this style are usually reckoned nearer 4 oz (about 1 cup) to 2 eggs. Two-thirds of an imperial pint is about 13 fl oz, or a little over 1 2/3 US cups of milk.
- A brisk ovenBrisk is usually equated with something in the region of 400-450F. At the long bake times given here, most modern ovens will do better started hot to set and lift the batter; a solid-fuel oven would in any case have been falling in heat through the cooking.
- Why an hour and a halfThe time is dictated by the raw steak and kidney buried in the batter, not by the batter itself. With browned meat or sausages the dish is done in 40-50 minutes; the batter will be leathery long before two hours are up.
- Brown the meatThe recipe treats frying the meat first as optional. It is worth doing: it gives colour and rendered fat the batter needs, and it shortens the bake considerably.
- A hot buttered dishThe dish and its fat should be thoroughly hot before the batter goes in, or the batter sits and stews instead of rising. Beef dripping was also commonly used for this and stands the heat better, though this recipe calls for butter.
- Resting and re-beatingAn hour or two of rest lets the starch hydrate and gives a better rise. Whisk again just before pouring, as the flour settles.
- Ox kidneyA quarter pound of ox kidney is strong-flavoured and needs its core of white fat and membrane cut out. Lamb's kidneys, halved and cored, are the milder substitute and easier to find.
- Cost and yield2s. 10d. is the price in old British currency (shillings and pence). It serves four to five.
Toad in the hole appears in English cookery well before the sausage version most people know now; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century recipes call for steak, kidney, chops or the remains of cold joints set in a Yorkshire-style batter. The name is generally traced to nothing more elaborate than the look of the thing, meat peering out of holes in the risen batter, though this remains a traditional explanation rather than a documented one. The entry here treats toad in the hole as a method rather than a fixed dish, which is why it runs through half a dozen substitutions in a single paragraph, fitting the filling to what was in the larder. The sausage version came to dominate later.