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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 Yorkshire-pudding batter poured over chops and baked in one dish. The original gives no oven temperature and no yield, and both matter here.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume in this book: one pint is 2 cups, roughly 8 to 9 oz. With one egg, add milk by eye until it pours -- somewhere in the region of 1 1/4 to 2 cups, since the original gives no quantity.
- Batter-cake consistencyThe comparison is to griddle-cake batter — thick enough to coat a spoon, thin enough to pour in a steady ribbon. Let it rest 20 to 30 minutes so the flour hydrates and the pudding rises higher.
- Oven temperatureUnspecified in the original. Batter puddings need a hot oven, 425F, to set and climb; a moderate oven gives a dense, damp result. If you drop the heat later to finish the meat, do it only after the batter has risen and browned.
- The hinge: get the dish and fat hot firstGrease the dish, add the chops, and heat both in the oven before the batter goes in; bear in mind the recipe calls for butter, which will brown if the dish is preheated hard. Batter poured into a cold dish rises less well.
- The little waterThe water with pepper and salt presumably keeps the chops from scorching, though the recipe does not say so and gives no quantity. Too much will slacken the batter where it meets the pan.
- One hour and the chopsAn hour at 425F will take lamb chops well past pink. If you want them rosy, brown them in the dish first and add them under the batter for the last 25 to 30 minutes, or accept fully cooked meat as the period intended.
- Cut of lambShoulder or neck chops suit this better than loin or rib: they are fattier, cheaper, and forgiving of long baking. Trim heavy fat or the batter will be greasy.
- YieldA 9x13-inch dish with four to six chops serves four. Serve straight from the oven — the pudding sinks within minutes.
Toad-in-the-hole is an English dish of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, built on the same principle as Yorkshire pudding: a cheap flour-and-egg batter baked around meat so that the drippings flavour the whole. The name is generally explained as the meat peeping out of the risen batter, though no one has documented who coined it. Early English versions used whatever was to hand — chops, kidneys, steak, pigeons — and the sausage version now standard in Britain is a later narrowing. Its appearance here, in a Southern American compilation, is a reminder of the thrift behind it: a batter stretches one or two chops per person into a full dish.