Toad-in-the-hole: don’t judge a dish by its name

The name ‘toad-in-the-hole’ suggests something a little more whimsical (or saucy) than its reality. The origins of the name are spurious and, to be honest, a little tenuous: I’ve seen theories that the hole is a hungry stomach and the toad a ‘substantial meal’, another that suggests the dish resembles the way toads peep their heads out of burrows, and another which attributes the name to a trend in the eighteenth century for live toads to be incased in stone. I confess, I don’t find any of these hugely convincing,

In its earliest incarnation it was simply referred to as ‘meat boiled in a crust’ (a strong contender for ‘least appealing name for a dish’, but then, so is ‘toad-in-the-hole’); in Hannah Glasse’s 1900 cookbook, there was a recipe for ‘Pigeons in a hole’ but, to be fair to her, at least actual pigeons were baked into the batter. Happily, it seems clear that no toads ever appear to have been harmed in the making of toad-in-the-hole.

For the uninitiated – and let’s be honest, the name doesn’t provide any clues – toad-in-the-hole is sausages baked in a yorkshire pudding: it’s generally cooked as a large dish designed to be served family-style, rather than individual puddings. This wasn’t always the case: although the name toad-in-the-hole appeared as early as the mid eighteenth century, it was a slightly different dish to the one we know today: batter puddings were initially designed to make scraps or small amounts of meat go further, bathing them in cheap, pillowy batter, and early recipes used leftovers or stewed meats; Mrs Beeton’s recipe used beef steak and lamb’s kidney.

One assumes that the toad in this situation is the sausage, and the hole the batter – a position supported by Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole, who reports that his friend Nigel was thrown out of school dinners for swearing at the toad-in-the-hole declaring it ‘All bleeding hole and no toad’.’