Toad in the hole is sausages baked into Yorkshire pudding batter in a single dish, until the batter puffs up around them and browns. Served with onion gravy, it is one of the great cheap British dinners.
The name
Genuinely unexplained. The dish is recorded from the 1780s, and the most repeated theory is simply visual — sausages poking out of the risen batter look a little like toads emerging from a hole. No contemporary explanation survives, and the name may just be the kind of thing people found funny in the eighteenth century.
Earlier versions used whatever meat was to hand, frequently leftovers, and were considerably less appealing. One nineteenth-century commentator complained about the practice of putting cheap meat in batter specifically so its quality could not be seen.
Making it
The technique is identical to Yorkshire pudding and the rules are the same:
- Make a batter of equal volumes of flour, egg and milk. Rest it — half an hour minimum, longer if you can.
- Brown the sausages first in the roasting tin. This matters; raw sausages in batter go pale and greasy.
- Get the fat in the tin genuinely smoking hot in a hot oven.
- Pour the batter in around the sausages and return it to the oven immediately.
- Do not open the oven door. The batter will collapse and will not recover.
A good toad in the hole rises dramatically up the sides of the tin, crisp and deep brown at the edges and slightly custardy underneath. A bad one is flat, pale and heavy.
The gravy
Onion gravy is not optional. Onions cooked slowly until deeply browned and sweet, then stock, a splash of ale and a reduction until it is glossy. The whole dish is dry without it, and generous quantities are expected. See gravy.
What to serve with it
Peas, or greens, or roasted root vegetables. Mashed potato is arguable — some households insist, others point out that batter and potato is a great deal of carbohydrate even by British standards.
The variations
- Individual toads — one sausage per Yorkshire pudding tin, which gives a better batter-to-sausage ratio and is much easier to serve.
- With black pudding or with chunks of bacon added.
- Vegetarian — with vegetarian sausages, which works perfectly well, and the batter itself is meat-free.
- With apple and sage — pork sausages, sliced apple and sage in the batter, which is a genuine improvement.
Why it survives
It is cheap, it uses store cupboard ingredients, it feeds four from a packet of sausages, and it looks considerably more impressive coming out of the oven than the effort involved justifies. That combination has kept it on British tables for two and a half centuries.