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March 1
Menu: Toad in the Hole; Pressed Beef with Aspic; Beet and Endive Salad; Compote of Fruit, Maids of Honor; Coffee Toad in the Hole-2 cups flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 pound link sausages, 2 eggs, 2 tablespoons melted Crisco, and 3 cups milk. Sift the flour and salt into a basin; beat up eggs well, and after mixing them with the milk and melted Crisco, pour gradually on a flour, beating it well with wooden spoon. When quite smooth, pour it into a well Criscoed fireproof dish; skin the sausages and lay them in the batter, and bake in a moderate oven for 3/4 of an hour. Serve in small squares arranged neatly overlapping each other on a hot dish.
A standard Yorkshire-pudding batter poured over sausages, here written for shortening rather than beef drippings. The batter is looser than most modern versions and the oven temperature given will not give you much lift.
- The hinge: a hot dish and a hot ovenBatter puddings rise because the fat and the pan are already screaming hot when the batter hits them. Heat the greased dish with the fat in it until it shimmers, then add batter and sausages and bake at 425F for the first 20 minutes before dropping to 375F for the remainder.
- "Moderate oven"In this period the term is usually taken to mean somewhere around 350F. At that temperature for 45 minutes the pudding will be softer and more custardy than a high-oven Yorkshire pudding, which sits comfortably with the instruction to cut it into squares, though the recipe gives no temperature and no reason for the squares.
- BasinAn English mixing bowl, not a measuring vessel. Sift the flour into it and beat the liquid in gradually to avoid lumps; a whisk does in two minutes what the wooden spoon does in ten.
- Crisco and the fat questionCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening and works, but 2 tablespoons of melted beef drippings or lard in the batter and in the dish gives the flavour the dish is built around. Modern Crisco has been reformulated to cut trans fats and is not the same product sold in 1913.
- Batter ratioTwo cups flour to three cups milk and only two eggs is thin and egg-light by current practice. Expect a soft, pancake-like result. Holding back half a cup of the milk gives a thicker batter closer to modern Yorkshire pudding proportions.
- Skinning the sausagesLink sausages of this date would have had natural casings; the recipe does not say why it wants them removed. With modern sausages you can leave the casings on; brown them first in the hot dish so they are coloured before the batter goes in, since 45 minutes in wet batter will not brown them.
- YieldA pound of sausage and this much batter will roughly fill a 9x13 dish and serve about six as a main course. Serve it promptly; the recipe calls for the squares to be arranged on a hot dish, which suggests the arranging was expected to cost some heat.
Toad in the hole is an English farmhouse economy dish, generally traced to the eighteenth century, when a cheap batter was stretched over a small amount of meat cooked beneath the joint as it roasted — the same principle as Yorkshire pudding, which caught the drippings. The name is usually explained as the sausages peeping through the risen batter like a toad from its hole, though the etymology is traditional rather than documented. Its appearance here is worth noting: The Story of Crisco was published in 1913 by Procter & Gamble to persuade American cooks that a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening could replace both butter and lard, and the Calendar of Dinners section exists to prove that every dish in the household repertoire — including British ones that depend entirely on animal fat — could be made with the new product. Substituting Crisco for beef drippings in a toad in the hole is exactly the kind of claim the book was written to make.