Toad in the hole is a traditional English dish consisting of sausage

Sausage

A sausage is a food usually made from ground meat , mixed with salt, herbs, and other spices, although vegetarian sausages are available. The word sausage is derived from Old French saussiche, from the Latin word salsus, meaning salted.Typically, a sausage is formed in a casing traditionally made...

s in Yorkshire pudding

Yorkshire pudding

Yorkshire Pudding is a dish that originated in Yorkshire, England. It is made from batter and usually served with roast meat and gravy.-History:...

 batter

Batter (cooking)

Batter is a semi-liquid mixture of one or more flours combined with liquids such as water, milk or eggs used to prepare various foods. Often a leavening agent such as baking powder is included to aerate and fluff up the batter as it cooks, or the mixture may be naturally fermented for this purpose...

, usually served with vegetables and onion gravy

Gravy

Gravy is a sauce made often from the juices that run naturally from meat or vegetables during cooking. In North America the term can refer to a wider variety of sauces and gravy is often thicker than in Britain...

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The origin of the name "Toad-in-the-Hole" is often disputed. Many suggestions are that the dish's resemblance to a toad

Toad

A toad is any of a number of species of amphibians in the order Anura characterized by dry, leathery skin , short legs, and snoat-like parotoid glands...

 sticking its head out of a hole provides the dish with its somewhat unusual name. It is rumored to have been called "Frog-in-the-Hole", at one time, although little if any evidence corroborates this assertion. It can also be referred to, less popularly, as "sausage toad".

An 1861 recipe by Charles Elme Francatelli

Charles Elme Francatelli

Charles Elmé Francatelli , Anglo-Italian cook, was born in London, of Italian extraction, in 1805, and was educated in France, where he studied the art of cookery. Coming to England, he was employed successively by various noblemen, subsequently becoming manager of Crockfords club...

 does not mention sausages, instead including as an ingredient "6d.

Penny (British pre-decimal coin)

The penny of the Kingdom of Great Britain and later of the United Kingdom, was in circulation from the early 18th century until February 1971, Decimal Day....

 or 1s.

Shilling

The shilling is a unit of currency used in some current and former British Commonwealth countries. The word shilling comes from scilling, an accounting term that dates back to Anglo-Saxon times where it was deemed to be the value of a cow in Kent or a sheep elsewhere. The word is thought to derive...

 worth of bits and pieces of any kind of meat, which are to be had cheapest at night when the day's sale is over." This recipe was described, as "English cooked-again stewed meat" (Lesso rifatto all'inglese) or "Toad in the Hole", in the first book of modern Italian cuisine of the nineteenth century, "L'Artusi" (Pub. 1891), in which the meat was nothing but left-over stewed meat cooked again in batter. During the 1940s, a wartime variation on the original used pieces of Spam

Spam (food)

Spam is a canned precooked meat product made by the Hormel Foods Corporation, first introduced in 1937. The labeled ingredients in the classic variety of Spam are chopped pork shoulder meat, with ham meat added, salt, water, modified potato starch as a binder, and sodium nitrite as a preservative...

 in place of sausage

Sausage

A sausage is a food usually made from ground meat , mixed with salt, herbs, and other spices, although vegetarian sausages are available. The word sausage is derived from Old French saussiche, from the Latin word salsus, meaning salted.Typically, a sausage is formed in a casing traditionally made...

s. An earlier recipe with a similar style is found in Hannah Glasse

Hannah Glasse

Hannah Glasse was an English cookery writer of the 18th century. She is best known for her cookbook, The Art of Cookery, first published in 1747...

's 1747 The Art of Cookery, where she presents a recipe for "Pigeons in a Hole", essentially pigeons cooked in a Yorkshire pudding batter.

The recipe itself is rather simple. A pan is placed into the oven and heated for about 15 minutes while the batter is prepared. The sausages and batter are added and cooked for half an hour. With frozen sausages, the meat is placed into the dish while heated. It is normally accompanied by gravy

Gravy

Gravy is a sauce made often from the juices that run naturally from meat or vegetables during cooking. In North America the term can refer to a wider variety of sauces and gravy is often thicker than in Britain...

 (often onion gravy), vegetables and potatoes, often mashed

Mashed potato

Mashed potato is made by mashing freshly boiled potatoes with a ricer, fork, potato masher, food mill, or whipping them with a hand beater. Dehydrated and frozen mashed potatoes are available in many places...

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