Toad In The Hole
One of many traditional British dishes with delightfully mysterious names, toad in the hole is sausages baked in essentially Yorkshire pudding. It’s also yet another take on meat-with-starch, like shepherd’s pie (minced meat and vegetables under a layer of mashed potatoes), bubble and squeak (leftover potatoes, meat and vegetables – usually including cabbage – made into patties and fried), and bangers and mash (sausages baked in a layer of mashed potatoes). Most of these are served with gravy, and possibly additional vegetables, although historically vegetables have not been high on the list of ‘Foods Loved By Britons’. Things are changing, though: one of the best meals I ever had was at a vegetarian restaurant near the Tower of London, and Yotam Ottolenghi, one of London’s most famous celebrity chefs, not only wrote a vegetarian-cooking column for the Times of London, but has vegetarian cookbooks out, and uses more vegetables than meat in his restaurants.
1 c whole milk (or half milk and half pale ale)
4 eggs
2 c (9oz) all purpose flour, sifted
1 T grated horseradish or 1 – 2 tsp fresh herbs (eg, sage, thyme), optional
salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 T olive oil
18 plump pork sausages of your choice (‘bangers’)
Preheat the oven to 400o F.
Put milk and eggs in a bowl and beat together well. Stir in the flour until smooth and let sit about 15 minutes. You can also do this in a blender or a large measuring cup with a spout.
Put equal amounts of oil in each of 12 large muffin cups (two 6-cup pans or one 12-cup one). Place in the oven until the oil is very hot. Cut the sausages in half and carefully put three pieces in each muffin cup. Put back in the oven and roast 8 – 10 minutes, until the sausages are nicely browned and mostly done. You may need to turn them a time or two to get them to cook evenly.
Remembering that everything is already hot, pull the rack with the muffin pan(s) just out of the oven and quickly pour the batter evenly over the sausages. Shove back in the oven and bake about 25 minutes until the batter has puffed up and is crisp and golden brown.
Serve with gravy flavored with onions and sage or other herbs.
Mushy Peas
Mushy peas are something of an exception to what I said above about vegetables. They’re British comfort food, much loved and much sought after by expatriates. They are the traditional accompaniment to fish and chips; I’m told dipping your battered-and-fried fish in the peas is a profound taste experience (but I don’t eat fish so I can’t attest to that first-hand…). You can buy canned mushy peas at stores catering to expats or import stores (World Market) or online, but it’s perfectly easy to make them yourself.
2 T unsalted butter
1 lb frozen peas, thawed
¼ c water
1 T lemon juice
Salt
Pepper
1 T finely chopped fresh mint, basil or sage (optional)
Melt 1 T butter in a skillet. Add the peas and water, and cook until the peas are very green and soft, mashing them to make something rather resembling refried beans, but still with some texture. Add the rest of butter and season to taste with lemon juice, salt and pepper. Stir in herbs if using.
Grated Carrots
Carrots, which could be grown at home and thus avoid rationing, were strongly advocated during and after World War II. (Rationing was only lifted in 1954.) The beta carotene in carrots improved eyesight, particularly night blindness, and thus would make people’s movement during blackouts safer. The archetypical rationing recipe, Woolton Pie (after Baron Woolton, Minister of Food) included carrots, cauliflower, turnips, and potatoes in brown gravy, under a ‘wholemeal’ (whole wheat, white flour being rationed) crust. Though much maligned at the time, it is still made today as a vegetarian comfort food.
Lots of carrots were also said to be behind Royal Air Force (RAF) fighter pilots’ great success against German night bombers, giving them incredibly acute vision and an edge (as well as, supposedly, an orange-ish tinge to their skin). It wasn’t true. The ‘edge’, was actually aircraft-mounted radar, newly developed and a major secret, which giving carrots the credit protected.
1 lb ordinary orange carrots
Unsalted butter
¼ c water
Salt and pepper to taste
Grate the carrots on the large holes of a box grater, or use your food processor’s largest disk. Melt some butter in a saucepan (2 T or so to start). Add the water and the carrots, and cook, stirring periodically, until they are just done. Season to taste with salt and pepper, and add more butter if needed.
Steamed Caramel Apple Pudding
Steamed puddings don’t at all resemble what Americans call puddings. They’re more like cake, but instead of baking, they’re cooked in simmering water. The Cratchits, in A Christmas Carol, probably didn’t have had an oven; their goose was roasted by a nearby baker for a small fee, rather than at home. But they could still have pudding, cooked in the ‘copper’ where water was heated for cleaning and laundry as well as cooking. Since the dough was wrapped in a floured cloth for steaming, it had “[a] smell like an eating-house and a pastry cook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that” and looked like “a speckled cannon-ball, … blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.” (A quartern is a quarter of a pint; ‘half of half-a-quartern’ would be two tablespoons.)
Steamed puddings come in all sorts of flavors, including Spotted Dick (with dark prunes in a white sponge), Roly Poly Pudding (essentially a steamed jelly roll), and, of course, plum, figgy or Christmas pudding (all the same thing, which does have dried fruit, but it might not be prunes or figs …), and now are more likely to be cooked in a ceramic ‘pudding basin’ or metal ‘pudding mold’ than to be wrapped in cloth.
These desserts were once so ubiquitous that the word ‘pudding’ (or shortened to ‘pud’) is frequently used to simply mean ‘dessert’, as in the child’s question, “Mum, what’s for pudding?” And other desserts, unrelated in technique, may also be called ‘puddings’; the most obvious is ‘summer pudding’, made by lining your pudding basin with thinly-sliced bread, filling it with sweetened berries, topping with more bread, and refrigerating it under weights.
Lest you think, though, that steamed puddings are some sort of Victorian oddity, this recipe is adapted from one recently published on their website by the BBC.
2 T unsalted butter
3 small apples, peeled, cored, and roughly chopped
2 ½ cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
½ teaspoon salt
1 ¼ c brown sugar
3 large eggs
¾ c plain yogurt or sour cream
½ c rum, brandy, Grand Marnier, orange or apple juice, or water
¾ c butter, melted and allowed to cool a bit
Cooking spray or more butter
¾ c purchased caramel sauce
Melt the butter in a skillet. Add the apples and cook, stirring occasionally, until just tender and a tiny bit browned.
Put the flour, baking powder, baking soda, nutmeg and salt in a very large bowl and whisk to combine.
Mix the brown sugar, eggs, and yogurt. Mix in the alcohol or other liquid. Drizzle in the melted butter while beating. Pour this mixture into the dry ingredients and stir until just combined.
Thoroughly grease a pudding basin, heat-proof bowl, or baking mold (eg, a Bundt pan); whatever you use should have either a clamp-on lid or a lip.
Mix the apples and the caramel sauce. Put them in the bottom of your vessel. Pour in the batter. The vessel should only be about 2/3 full.
Cover the vessel with the greased lid or a sheet of greased foil. Clamp the lid down, or take a length of string or kitchen twine and tie it over the foil so that the foil and string are caught under the lip. If your foil is wide enough, you can fold about a 1 – 1½ inch pleat into it to give the pudding room to rise. If you’re using a baking mold with a center tube, be sure the foil is sealed well there, and the moisture can’t get in that way; poke through the foil and crimp it down the center. Most pudding molds have a handle on the lid; if you’re using a basin, bowl or baking mold, use some extra string to create a handle. Alternatively, you can tie a dish towel down over the foil and use the corners to fashion a handle. Be sure the string and/or dish towel is secure: that thing is going to be hot when it comes out of the steamer.
Fill a large pot or slow cooker about half-way with water. Heat to just short of the boil; you want a sustained very low simmer, just so the water shimmers, but only a very, very few bubbles, if any, break the surface. My 6-quart slow cooker does a terrific job on the High setting, and I sometime use the steam-table inserts that came with it instead of a pudding basin.
Place a rack in the bottom of the pot or slow cooker and lower the pudding into the hot water. The water should come about half way up the basin. Leaving the heat at the same level, steam for about 2 hours. Add more hot water if needed to keep the level about the same the whole time. (It won’t hurt to leave it somewhat longer; the heat is gentle, and some old recipes call for as long as 6 hours.) Test as for any cake; if a long toothpick or skewer comes out clean, it’s done. Remove from the steamer carefully, using the handle and protecting your hands.
Let cool about 15 minutes, unmold onto a platter so that the apples are uppermost and the caramel sauce runs down over the pudding.
Serve with whipped cream, vanilla custard sauce (crème anglaise), or (very American, but now acceptable in Britain) ice cream, and more caramel sauce.
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