Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Toad-In-A-Hole
1 lb. sausages 2 eggs 1 pint (2 cups) milk 1/2 teaspoonful salt 3 tablespoonfuls flour Pepper to taste Remove the skin from the sausages and put them into a buttered fireproof dish. Mix the flour, salt, pepper, add the eggs well beaten and the milk, beat for five minutes, and pour over the sausages. Bake for thirty minutes in a moderate oven. Serve hot.
Another method. Blanch three pigs' brains, trim them and cut in slices. Arrange the slices at the bottom of a pan with two slices of bacon cut in small pieces, two tablespoonfuls of chopped onion, one teaspoonful of chopped parsley, a chopped pickle, salt and pepper to taste and one cupful of stock; bring to boiling point.
Mix one-half cupful of flour with one-half
Two dishes are printed under one name here. The first is the familiar sausage-in-batter; the second, which shares only the title, is a brain stew and should not be attempted.
- Why the second method failsIt is built on pigs' brains, and brain and spinal tissue are the tissues through which transmissible spongiform encephalopathies pass to people. The risk is documented for cattle (BSE and variant CJD, which is untreatable and fatal); no naturally occurring TSE is recognised in pigs, so the cattle case is not a direct parallel, but brain is the tissue in which any such agent concentrates. Use a current recipe if you want a braised offal dish.
- The blanching is not a safety step"Blanch three pigs' brains" means a brief firming in acidulated water to make them sliceable. No cooking time or temperature in this method addresses the hazard, because heat does not destroy prion protein at kitchen temperatures.
- The text stops mid-sentenceThe second method breaks off at "one-half cupful of flour with one-half" — presumably butter or stock, for a thickening roux. There is no ending, no cooking time and no yield, which is another reason not to work from it.
- Moderate ovenFor the first method, read "moderate" as roughly 350-375F. Modern batter recipes generally run hotter, around 425F, and preheat the fat in the dish before the batter goes in.
- UnitsThe book glosses the pint as 2 cups, i.e. an American pint of 16 fl oz rather than an Imperial one. Three tablespoons of flour to 2 cups of milk is a very thin batter by modern standards -- current toad-in-the-hole generally runs closer to a cup of flour to a cup of milk.
- Sausages"Remove the skin" assumes natural casings on a coarse fresh sausage. Modern breakfast or Cumberland-style links can be left in their casings; browning them first in the dish gives the fat the batter needs.
- YieldA pound of sausages in a batter of this size serves four as a main course with gravy and a green vegetable.
Toad-in-the-hole is an English economy dish, recorded from the eighteenth century onward, in which a small amount of meat is stretched by a Yorkshire-pudding batter; the name is generally explained as the meat peeping out of the risen batter like a toad from its hole, though that reading is traditional rather than documented. What is striking about this entry is the second method, which has nothing to do with batter at all and appears to have drifted in from a French repertoire: cervelles braised with bacon, onion, parsley and pickle, thickened with flour, is a treatment of brains that seems to have been familiar in the nineteenth century. Offal was then an ordinary, cheap part of the week's eating rather than a curiosity. It fell out of British and American home cooking for reasons of taste long before the BSE epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s led food safety authorities to restrict cattle specified risk material outright.