GRUB!: Toad in the Hole

It's been a very quiet start to 2020 here at Go Stay Work Play Live World Headquarters on board the Lucky Nickel. I’m stalled on two different work projects waiting for other people to do things, and motivation for any grand project or adventure has been low, so I’m contenting myself with minor boat maintenance and brief excursions into the outside world. (And a bit of wassailing of course.)

And photographing stunning sunrises like this one.

We’ve had some quite blustery weather of late, which along with the long travel times for me to get from the marina to anywhere besides Tesco, and the fact that dusk seems to come at about 3:15pm, has meant that I’ve been mostly cocooned in the boat listening to the ropes creak and bingeing on videos. As I said, I’m easing in.

Along with the foul weather and general aimlessness comes the desire for properly cozy food and the time to faff around with it. And since I’d rather cook up something yummy from the comfort of my home than venture out into the rain and wind to find something to blog about, it seemed a good time to pick from the list of potential GRUB! topics. Thus, Toad in the Hole! (Though I did ponder treacle tart quite seriously. All in good time.)

Toad in the Hole is a dish that falls into that enormous category of foodstuffs where meat - in this case sausages - is the star, supported and surrounded by a comforting carbohydrate of some form. The intention with these dishes is to stretch a small amount of an expensive ingredient into a meal for many people (like fish pie or, say, shaving black truffles over a big pot of Kraft Dinner.) I’ll admit now that I’d never had Toad in the Hole before I decided to try it out on this occasion, and if I’d given it any particular thought I suppose I’d assumed the the “hole” into which the toad sausage was planted was some kind of potatoey something-or-other.

(Pause for cries of shock and outrage)

Of course I was woefully misinformed on this subject. Toad in the Hole is, of course, comprised of sausages nestled in a crisp and tasty bed of Yorkshire pudding! This was a revelatory discovery and certainly put a bit more spring in my culinary step as I contemplated supper.

I suppose now I should pause because there’s a chance that somewhere out there in GSWPL-land there may be some sadly deprived readers who are living a grey and unfulfilled Yorkshire pudding-less existence. My condolences to you if you are one of those people, but cheer up because you are about to be introduced to the glory that is Yorkshire pudding!

First of all, this is one of those cases where we’re using the term pudding in its broadest possible sense meaning, basically, food. It’s not Bill Cosby Jell-o pudding custardy thing, and it’s not a chilled and set sweet thing like summer pudding. It’s also not a sweet steamed effort like sticky toffee pudding or Christmas pudding and it’s not a steamed savoury thing like steak and kidney pudding. Or even a sausagey sort of thing like black pudding. (And now I just have to pause and comment that I have blogged about a LOT of pudding.) Unaccountably, Yorkshire pudding is a light and airy baked affair that’s closest cousin is probably American style popovers. Which is to say that it’s a thin batter of flour, egg and liquid, baked with some fat and resulting in a crispy light puffed up golden brown thing that’s really really really good with gravy. Traditionally it’s made in a large baking dish and cut up to be served but it’s actually very common (at least when you’re not in Yorkshire) to get little individual Yorkshire puddings made in muffin tins. These little ones have the advantage of being mostly hollow when done correctly, meaning they are a perfect vessel for gravy.

Yorkshire puddings made in a muffin tin, from Mary Berry’s recipe. Note that Yorkshire puddings are often simply referred to as “Yorkshires” or even simply “Yorkies” (Not to be confused with the dogs or the chocolate bars.)

So, Toad in the Hole is sausages in Yorkshire pudding. Simple. Filling. Sure to be delicious. And because it was sad to contemplate Yorkshires without gravy, I decided to whip up some onion gravy to go along, since it was mentioned in one of the recipes I found and gravy is pretty much always a good idea.

The gathering of ingredients, along with the chosen baking dish.

My effort was based on this recipe from the Guardian, though I’ve noted changes I made.

Toad in the Hole with Onion Gravy:

For the Toad:
6 sausages (I used 4. There’s only one of me and I suspected that a day’s worth of leftovers would be plenty.)

For the Hole:
3 tbsp beef dripping or good lard (I just used olive oil, which was the only oil I generally stock)
2 eggs
100g plain flour, sifted, plus 1 tbsp extra for the gravy. (Sifted? Who has time to sift? I’m unemployed and even I don’t have the time for that. Life is too short to sift.)
85ml whole milk
85ml ale (I think this is meant to add lightness to the batter but it’s probably very optional. Just make sure to end up with the right total amount of liquid.)
2 tbsp wholegrain mustard
1 tbsp neutral oil (Or perhaps might I suggest... olive oil?)

For the gravy:
2 medium onions
A bit more oil (Like maybe olive oil?)
500ml (2 cups) of beef stock (A stock cube is fine. This is not the Cordon Bleu.)
A bit of flour

Method:
1. Take the batteries out of the smoke detector. You’ll thank me later.

2. Put the oil/dripping in the pan and put it in the oven, which you are about to turn on.

3. Heat the pan with the oil to one million degrees. (This is the one thing that EVERYONE mentions about making Yorkshire pudding: you must get the fat in the pan very hot. Very, very hot. Mary Berry says “absolutely piping hot”. My mom says “screaming hot”. And my mate Simon says, “it should be one degree away from taking down the whole neighbourhood”. Note this might be slightly less that one millions degrees. Perhaps try setting the oven for 200-220ºC/400-450ºF.)

4. Brown the sausages and then set them aside. They’ll cook through in the oven, but won’t get that nice browned look without this step. Plus then you can use all the crunchy leftover bits in the pan for the gravy.

5. Make the batter by cracking the eggs into a large bowl and beating vigorously with a whisk or electric beater, until thick and voluminous. Beat in the flour and milk alternately in small amounts, until you have a smooth batter.

I don’t have an electric beater, but I do have this nifty little hand-cranked food processor sort of thing that I got at a dollar store in Azerbaijan. I has a chopping blade, a whipping attachment and a basket for spin-drying greens. Genius little device, plus this was the first time I’ve got to use the whipping thingy, so yay!

4. Add the ale and mustard and beat again. (At this point the batter will be worryingly runny and you might want to WhatsApp your mom if she is a seasoned Yorkshire pudding maker and send her a quick video of the runniness, after which she will assure you that it looks fine and mention AGAIN that the fat really must be very very VERY hot.)

5. Let the batter sit for a bit while you’re waiting for the oven rack to start melting, which is a good indication that the fat is almost hot enough. (This is the point at which I had the little boat oven turned up to gas mark nine, which is as high as it goes. That’s supposed to be equivalent to 275 deg c but was actually hovering around 200 on my oven thermometer. This is also the point at which I started to think my first Yorkshire puddings were not going to set any records for awesomeness.)

6. Get the fire extinguisher out of the cupboard and set it nearby. Remove the pan of hot fat from the oven and quickly pour in the batter, which should sizzle when it hits the oil. Add the sausages after that, take photo for your blog (optional), and then get the whole thing back in the oven. Bake for about 35 minutes until the batter has risen beautifully and is golden brown and delicious. (Alternatively, peer helplessly through the grease-spattered window of your inadequate oven trying to see if it’s rising at all.)

Optional Photo. Yes everything is kind of swimming in fat. 

This is not a diet food situation, people.

7. In between peering, get on with the gravy. Slice the onion thinly, add a bit more oil to the sausage pan, and get it all on the heat. The onion should cook slowly on low heat. Really slowly. They shouldn’t brown so much as melt. Help things along by adding a bit of stock to the pan.

8. Once the onions have cooked down a lot add most of the stock and let it cook down more to thicken. Once you get tired of waiting for it to thicken, add a spoon of flour to the remaining stock and mix it into a slurry and then pour that in to thicken things up because honestly who has time to wait for gravy to thicken when there is Yorkshire pudding to be had?

9. Get the Toad in the Hole out of the oven.

10. Put the batteries back in the smoke detector (do NOT forget this step) and put away the fire extinguisher.

11. Eat!

The finished dish. Not much rise on the Yorkshire pudding, but the gravy’s looking decent.

And that's Toad in the Hole, Lucky Nickel style. I also steamed some broccoli to go along with it, and even though the Yorkshire pudding was nothing like as high and light as it could have been, it still tasted like Yorkshire pudding, if a bit more dense. Plus I had almost a whole can of beer left and lots of gravy, so all in all I’m calling this a success and a very worthwhile way to spend an evening.

Here we come a wassailing!

I’m finally back in London, back on the boat, and settling in to 2020. But there was one last festive event to attend before the first Monday morning of the new year: Twelfth Night!

As any fule kno, Twelfth Night occurs twelve days after Christmas and the day before Epiphany (the day on which the Magi visited the Christ Child). These two days are traditionally seen as the end of the Christmas season and many people take them as a cue to pack up the Christmas tree and get on with the drudgery of January. I took them as a cue to shake off the jet-lag of the previous day’s red-eye flight and accept Piran’s invitation to breakfast and a Twelfth Night celebration at Bankside, which promised to include wassailing, a Green Man, twelfth cake, mummery and a good old fashioned farandole. I mean how could you not?

First things first: wassailing has nothing to do with sailing. Wassail is a hot mulled cider drink whose name derives from the Old English “was hál” meaning “be hale”. Which is a lot like the Russian drinking salute "На здоровье!” meaning “to health”. (Also used in French, German, Italian, Greek, Irish, Spanish, Welsh... I could go on). It’s a toast! Which is funny because wassail is traditionally served with slices of toast floating in it and sipped from a big communal drinking vessel called a wassail bowl. Hence, the lyrics to the carol:

"Wassail! wassail! all over the town,

Our toast it is white and our ale it is brown;

Our bowl it is made of the white maple tree;

With the wassailing bowl, we'll drink unto thee."

Wassail is integral to the practice of wassailing, which comes in two forms. The first is very similar to carolling, involving going door-to-door singing and offering drinks from the wassail bowl (hence the lyrics of the song). The second, and more appropriate to my Twelfth Night festivities, is particular to apple and cider producing areas of England and involves visiting the local orchards on Twelfth Night, to drink and sing to the health of the cider apple trees and ensure a good harvest the next year. Often the soggy wassail toast is placed is the branches of the trees by the Wassail Queen (more on her later) as a gift to the tree spirits.

It’s all very folky and earthy, which brings us to the next component: the Green Man. He's frequently seen as carved stone decoration in churches and secular buildings and normally depicted as a face completely covered in or made from leaves. It seems like it must be some kind of ancient folklore so I was surprised to discover that this centuries-old architectural motif wasn’t even named “The Green Man” until 1939. Since that time the Green Man has been adopted as a counter-culture symbol of nature, rebirth, and the cycle of the seasons, which is how we found him on Twelfth Night, in his winter form as the Holly Man. (The Green Man is also a very popular pub name, with at least seven Green Mans in the Greater London area.)

The Holly Man and his supporters, crossing the Thames on the Millennium Bridge.

This is where Piran and I joined the crowd on Sunday morning, having enjoyed a very piggy breakfast which included three kinds of pig-derived yumminess and walked through the city to catch up with the revelry just as the Holly Man and his gang (including a piper!) were starting across the bridge at St. Paul's. The Holly Man himself is portrayed by David Risley, who dons the green every year, re-making the living bits every time. (I know this because of course the Green Man has a facebook page. Also: Piran told me.) His makeup was particularly impressive, as you’ll see later.

The Bankside Twelfth Night celebrations are led each year by a group of performers called the Lions Part, who also do an autumnally themed thing in October. We followed the Holly Man & Co. across the bridge to the riverbank near the Globe Theatre, where they were met by the other half of the company who’d paraded over from the George Inn (more on the George later).

More mummers arriving in thier distinctive costumes completely covered in multicoloured rags. They’re thought to originate with Mummers’ humble roots when poor performers would turn their only coat inside out and decorate the lining with cheap strips of discarded cloth.

After everyone arrived the group proceeded to wassail the boats on the river and the Globe Theatre, with the support and encouragement of the actual Mayor of Southwark, who appeared in full ceremonial robes. Luckily I’d bought a program so could recite along with the wassailing toast before the whole company moved a bit further east to get ready for the Mummers' Play.

Mummers' plays date from around mid to late 18th century and are traditional folk tales a bit like early pantos with a stock cast of characters that normally include the hero Saint George (or King George in our case, or Prince George... you get the idea) and a baddie called the Turkish Knight. These two fight to the death but then the vanquished character is brought back to life by the Doctor, who revives the casualty through odd and comic means, thus symbolically reawakening the earth from the dead of winter. Other characters also come into the play including Cleverlegs, a minstrel; Father Christmas; Beelzebub, who gives a topical monologue; and Jill Finney (modern gender-reversed version of the role) who exhorts cash donations from the crowd at the end of the performance. (I took a bunch of photos of the performance, but the sightline was awful so there’s no use posting them here.)

(Side note particularly for Far Eastern Canadians: Mummers and Mummers’ plays are obviously related to the old Newfoundland practise of mummering, wherein jolly gangs of mummers dress up in outrageous disguises which seem to require wearing extra-large undergarments outside your clothing. Mummers visit their neighbours houses where they sing, dance, tell jokes and do all manner of informal performance until the people in the house correctly guess their identities. The hosts are also expected to provide food and drink, and the whole thing sounds quite jolly. Oh, and these days there’s an annual parade!)

The final part of our Twelfth Night mummers' performance was the crowning of the Twelfth Night royalty: King Bean and Queen Pea. Small cakes - Twelfth Bakes - were given out to everyone in the crowd, and whoever got the pea and bean would be assigned the royal role. It's a bit like finding the sixpence in the Christmas Pudding but instead of conferring good luck, you get to be king for a day. The French do the same thing for Epiphany with King Cake.)

Handing out Twelfth Bakes.

So hopeful. Sadly, neither of us were crowned. The lucky two got to wear rustic handmade crowns. It’s thought that the simple paper crowns and other regalia once made for Twelfth Night royalty are the origins of the paper hats we now get in Christmas crackers.

With the royalty crowned it was time to move on, but to where? The pub, of course! The whole crowd was exhorted to join the mummers in a farandole all the way from the Globe Theatre to the George Inn on Borough High Street.

A farandole is a folk dance originating in France and in our case involved making a very very long moving human chain all the way to the pub, led by two of the mummers. Of course Piran and I joined in behind the Turkish Knight, who led a merry way through Southwark and Borough Market, winding and bending as much as possible and necessitating a few cries of “Mind the bollards!” as each obstacle was encountered. The line started out quite short, though it did include a guy who’d arrived on his Brompton. Rather than miss out, he simply hung onto the handlebars of his folded bike, and the next person in the line hung onto the seat. I thought this was quite clever since Bromptons can get tiring to carry on your own.

Of course I’ve got no photos of the farandole because both my hands were occupied the whole time. But it was quite fun, despite the awkward rotation of the shoulder that was required to stay connected with the woman behind me. The path to the pub was about half a mile long - not a short distance to travel without breaking the chain, especially with more and more people joining along the route. We also had to cross Borough High Street, a major thoroughfare. Luckily, mummer volunteers in rags and hi-vis vests were along to stop traffic, though by the time we at the front of the line were at the pub, the tail was still on the other side of the road at least 350 feet away. I’ve no idea how they managed to hold back the traffic for that long but one of the mummers was very excited because apparently this was the first year they’ve got all the way to the pub without breaking the chain! Surely this bodes well for 2020.

And now finally: The George Inn!

It’s a fantastic pub, and one I’ve been to many times. The last remaining galleried coaching inn in London, there’s been a pub on the site since the late 1500s! The inside is a rambling collection of cozy small rooms, but the big feature is the outside courtyard, especially lovely in summer. Sadly they no longer rent rooms so it's a bit of a stretch to call it an Inn, but I suppose when you've been around for 450-ish years you get a bit of leeway.

The galleried bit of “galleried inn”. (Neither of us got a decent photo of the yard so this one is from Wikimedia: By Ewan Munro from London, UK - George, Borough, SE1, CC BY-SA 2.0)

When we arrived the yard was rammed already and the bar was worse, so I left Piran to help wassail the George Inn while I fetched the beer. The Lions Part gang did some singing and I heard there was storytelling in the Snug, though we did not partake. Mostly we just hung out in the yard catching up and grabbing photos with the mummers when we could.

See what I mean about his makeup?

Night fell, and I polished off a pint of George ale and a cup of some kind of mulled cider which I suppose was basically wassail (not including toast) but was mostly nice because it was very warm and did not include toast. The festivities wound down slowly and eventually we left for the walk to the station, having seen off the festive season in proper fashion.

Wassail, Astute Go Stay Work Play Live Readers!

And Happy 2020.