Achievement unlocked: Britcooking

Earlier this week, I mentioned once again finding some lower-sodium sausages at the store and that I might try making Toad-in-the-Hole.

I did that tonight:



Yeah, it's not pretty, but a lot of this type of cooking isn't.

Toad-in-the-Hole and the very closely related Yorkshire pudding (same batter, different way of cooking) serve similar purposes: to stretch out a smaller amount of meat to serve a larger number of people. Commonly, Yorkshire pudding was cooked under the roast and the drippings were allowed to fall on it to flavor it - so the people who got a little bit of beef but a bigger bit of pudding had the flavor of the beef.

(The parts of the pudding closest to the sausages were the best-tasting)

I did half a batch here (2 eggs) because this is rich, heavy food (so a small serving is enough) and I didn't want to be eating it forever. (I hope it heats up okay. A lot of cookbooks say not to reheat Yorkshire pudding, but in my family we did...it's okay leftover. Not as good as fresh, but okay and perfectly edible. So I hope this will heat up for lunches the next couple days).

Essentially this is like a heavy eggy pancake cooked around sausages and I suspect it's culinarily related to Dutch babies or those big German baked pancakes, just not sweet.

We often had Yorkshire in my family - the traditional Christmas dinner, which we still  have, is standing rib roast with Yorkshire, as a nod to the British Isles heritage on both sides of the family. Except, my mom does them a little differently than the standard. The "typical" way most cookbooks show it is baked in a square dish (like I have here) but she always did individual ones in muffin tins. It took a bit more work and required more dripping (she sometimes mixed it with butter if there wasn't enough) BUT you get a bigger proportion of the nice, beefy-tasting crusty outside, and no one gets stuck with the soggy center piece. (I have since talked to British people who said, "Oh, my mum did it that way, too!" so I don't think it's that unusual a preparation)

I served it with stir-fried spinach. Maybe not traditional but I felt like I needed a green veg with it.

It was pretty good. The sausages were not optimal as they were the pre-cooked kind (so I didn't do the step of cooking them first, just plopped them in the batter) and they were also low-fat turkey ones, and I think the old-school fatty pork "belly bombs" would be a lot better for this.

Also, even with heavily oiling (corn oil) the pan, it still kind of stuck. (Also, next time I might use butter, that might give a better flavor. Peanut oil might be good, too, but I never seem to have that on hand.

Edited to add: This is one of those profoundly dumb and silly things one finds on the internet, but I am easily amused by rather dumb things, and it kind of fits, so here's Duckfaced Gordon Ramsay: