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Toad in the Hole

This is a really very easy and excellent thing to cook for a relaxed Saturday lunch or something. You can make an onion gravy and batter well in advance and then half an hour before you want to eat you whack the sausages in the pan, pour over the batter and it’s done.

Don’t worry – or rather, you ought not to worry – that this is perhaps not a very sophisticated thing to cook. Everyone will be beside themselves to get toad in the hole for lunch and cooking lunch at home for friends (if you have some) is not about sophistication; it’s about you not screeching around the house, bright red, going ‘shit shit shit the roulade is FUCKED’ and then sitting down, taking two mouthfuls of dry beef and wailing ‘This is horrible – no-one eat it!!!!!!’

Not that I speak from experience or anything.

Toad in the Hole

Batter makes enough for 4–6.

Allow 2 sausages each for girls and 3 each for boys. I’m not being sexist and trying to make out that girls have tiny tummies and eat nothing because they’re all on diets to get thin, thin, thin so they can marry a rich man because that’s all they’re good for – I’m just saying in general, girls eat two and boys eat three.

Of course, one girl will eat only one and another girl will have three. One boy will have only two and one girl has one and the other girl will have four. It’s just a rule of thumb, okay? Just so that you don’t go mental and buy 50 sausages for six people.

For the batter

 120g plain flour

 ½ tsp salt

 1 egg

 1 egg yolk

 300ml milk

For the toad

 sausages, nice ones

 3–4 tbsp vegetable oil or, ideally, beef dripping – about 25g

1 Preheat the oven to 220ºC. Whisk together the batter ingredients. You’re less likely to get lumps if you half-mix the eggs and dry ingredients together before adding the milk. Rest the batter if you feel like it.

2 Put the fat in a roasting pan and stick it in the hot oven for 3–4 minutes until it’s melted, then add the sausages.

3 Put the sausages back in the oven in the fat for 8–10 minutes. Now this is really important, so stop daydreaming and listen to me: the fat must be SMOKING hot before you pour the batter in. When you open the oven and blue-ish smoke billows out, that’s when it’s time to pour the batter in. (I was always a bit scared of getting the fat this hot in the oven because I thought it would catch on fire or something. But turns out it doesn’t. This same principle applies to Yorkshire puddings. The fat must be SMOKING and then they will puff up gorgeous; if not, they will be shit.)

4 Take the pan out of the oven when the fat is SMOKING and pour the batter around the sausages. Turn the oven down to 180ºC.

5 Put the pan back in for 30 minutes, but check on it after 20 just to make damn sure it’s not alight. It’ll be ready when it’s all puffed up and golden brown.

There is a school of thought that says that one ought to cook the sausages for 15 minutes then take out HALF the sausages, pour over half the batter, put back in the oven for five minutes, then add the rest of the sausages and batter, so that you get sort of layers of sausage and batter. Personally I think that sounds like a recipe for total disaster, but you must do what you think is best.

Eat with cabbage. And maybe a nice onion gravy, if you can find a half-decent recipe.