Pork: Salt
Toad in the Hole (English recipe). 1 cupful flour, 1 egg, 1 cupful milk, Salt and pepper, Put the flour in a basin with the salt and make a well in the center.
Break the egg and put it in with a quarter of the milk. Beat well, then add the remainder of the milk by degrees, beating all the time. Melt the butter in a pudding tin. Parboil the sausages, cut them in halves, and put them in the tin. Add the baking powder to the batter, and pour it over the sausages. Bake in a hot oven half an hour.
C a a, Bread Raiser; b, Fluted Cake Tin with Tube in Center; c, Crown Mold for Jellies.
Sausage and Apple.
Prick the skins of the sausages, simmer in a frying pan fifteen minutes, drain, and brown in the oven; make a sirup of 1 cupful each sugar and water, and in it cook pared apples, cut lattice fashion, a few at a time, to preserve the shape. Serve the sausage on the apple.
Broiled Pigs' Feet.
Scrape the feet and wash them thoroughly, soak in cold water two hours, then wash and scrape again.
Split each in half lengthwise, and tie the pieces separately in pieces of cheese cloth. Place in a deep cover with boiling water, add 1 tablespoonful salt, and simmer slowly until the feet are tender, usually about four hours.
Take them from the liquor and set aside until cold; remove the cloths; they are ready then to be broiled in saucepan, 1 teaspoonful Calumet baking the following: powder, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, Sausages. 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 tablespoonful lemon juice, teaspoonful salt, MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK Dash McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce, tablespoonful finely chopped parsley.
Three pork dishes run together here by a careless typesetter — the ingredient lists for the toad in the hole, the sausages and the pigs' feet sauce have all collided in the last few lines. Sorted out, they are straightforward, and the batter is a standard Yorkshire pudding batter.
- Reading the jumbled textThe toad in the hole takes 1 cup flour, 1 egg, 1 cup milk, salt, pepper, 1 teaspoon baking powder and 2 tablespoons butter for the tin. The trailing list — 2 tablespoons butter, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, salt, Tabasco and chopped parsley — is the sauce for the broiled pigs' feet, not part of the batter.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; for batter puddings this is usually taken as roughly 425–450°F. Getting the fat in the tin thoroughly hot before the batter goes in helps the pudding climb the sides rather than sit flat and greasy.
- The baking powderA period habit rather than a necessity. A well-beaten batter rested half an hour rises perfectly well on steam alone; the powder gives a softer, cakier crumb. Leave it out if you want the classic crisp-edged version.
- Pudding tinA shallow metal roasting tin or a cast-iron skillet, something in the region of 9 by 12 inches for this quantity. Metal heats faster than glass or ceramic and gives a better initial lift.
- Parboiling the sausagesModern fresh sausages need no more than a brief browning in the tin; a full parboil leaches flavour and splits the skins. Brown them in the hot fat, then pour the batter round them.
- Simmering sausages fifteen minutesIn the apple dish this is longer than today's sausages want. Prick, cook gently until just firm and coloured through, then finish in the oven.
- Pigs' feetFour hours at a bare simmer is correct — the collagen has to break down completely or the halves will not hold together under the broiler. Chilling them overnight in their own liquor firms them up and makes them far easier to handle.
- Calumet and McIlhennyBrand names embedded in the text, as happened in period cookbooks that carried brand endorsements. Any double-acting baking powder and any Louisiana-style pepper sauce will do.
- YieldThe batter will stretch to three or four servings; something like a pound of sausages suits this quantity, though the recipe specifies none.
Toad in the hole is an English batter pudding of the same family as Yorkshire pudding, and eighteenth-century versions buried whatever cheap meat was to hand in the batter, the sausage-only form becoming standard only later. The name is generally traced to the look of the meat peeping out of the risen batter; no earlier or more literal origin is documented. Its appearance in an American household compendium beside pigs' feet and sausage-with-apple is telling: this is a chapter about using the whole hog and stretching it, and a cup of flour and one egg turning a pound of sausage into a family dinner is exactly the kind of economy such books were sold on. The flourish of Tabasco on the pigs' feet, and the branded baking powder, date the page to the era when national brands had begun to write themselves into the recipes themselves.