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Toad in the Hole
1½ lb. (2 cups) flour ½ teaspoonful salt 1 lb. link sausages 2 eggs 1/2 pints (3 cups) milk Sift the flour and salt into a basin; beat up the eggs well, and after mixing them with the milk, pour gradually on the flour, beating it well with a wooden spoon. When quite smooth, pour it into a well-buttered fireproof dish; skin the sausages and lay them in the batter, and bake in a moderate oven for three-quarters of an hour.
Pieces of apples, rhubarb, prunes, or pieces of cold meat or fish may be substituted for the sausages.
The fruit requires a little sugar, and sugar must also be served along with the pudding.
A plain batter pudding with sausages in it. The book's own bracketed conversions are unreliable, so read the quantities before you start.
- The flour figure is wrong1½ lb of flour is roughly five and a half cups, not two. Two cups (about 9 oz) is the amount that suits the liquid and eggs given here, and is the likelier reading of the original (½ lb).
- The milk figure is a typoThe milk figure looks like a typo -- "1/2 pints (3 cups)" should read 1½ pints; that equals 3 cups only if a pint is reckoned at 16 fl oz (an imperial pint of 20 fl oz would give nearer 3¾ cups). With 2 cups of flour and 2 eggs that gives a thin, pourable batter, which is what you want.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. Modern practice for batter puddings favours a hotter start — around 425F for the first fifteen minutes, then down — because the steam is what makes it rise. At a steady moderate heat for 45 minutes you will get a denser, more custardy pudding.
- Fireproof dishAn ovenproof earthenware or enamelled dish. A metal roasting tin or cast-iron skillet works better here, since it takes and holds heat faster and browns the underside.
- Skinning the sausagesWorth doing as instructed, but brown them first in the dish and pour the batter over the hot fat. Raw sausagemeat sunk in cold batter for 45 minutes at 350F renders poorly and can leave the centre of the pudding greasy and pale.
- Rest the batterThe recipe does not say so, but half an hour's standing after beating lets the flour hydrate and gives a better rise. Beat again briefly before pouring.
- The sweet variationsApple, rhubarb and prune versions turn this into a batter pudding in the older English sense — closer to clafoutis than to supper. Rhubarb stalks only; the leaves are not food. Fruit versions want the sugar in the batter as well as at the table.
- YieldEnough for four to six as a main course with gravy, or six as a pudding. Best served straight from the oven, as batter puddings sink as they cool.
Toad in the hole is recorded in English cookery well before sausages became its standard filling — eighteenth and nineteenth-century versions used odd scraps of beef or mutton dropped into Yorkshire pudding batter, and the name is generally explained as the meat peeping out of the risen batter like a toad from its hole. That thrift is still visible in this entry, which treats the sausages as one option among cold meat, fish or fruit; the batter is the dish, the filling is whatever the house has.