Toad in the hole is a traditional English dish consisting of sausages in Yorkshire pudding batter, usually served with onion gravy and vegetables.
The origin of the name is unclear, but it may refer to the way toads wait for their prey in their burrows, making their heads visible in the earth, just like the sausages peep through the batter.
Dishes like toad in the hole appeared in print as early as 1762 and were created as a way to stretch out cheap meat in poor households. In 1747, for example, Hannah Glasse's "The Art of Cookery" listed a recipe for 'Pigeons in a Hole'. While Charles Elme Francatelli's 1852 recipe mentions "6d. or 1s." worth of any kind of cheap meat. This recipe was described as "English cooked-again stewed meat" (lesso rifatto all'inglese) in the first book of modern Italian cuisine, which stressed that meat was to be leftover from stews and re-cooked in batter.
The first mention of the word 'hole', outside of 'Pigeons in a Hole', appeared in the 1900 publication "Notes & Queries", which described the dish as a "batter-pudding with a hole in the middle containing meat". Northerners tend to use dripping to make their puddings crispier, whereas Southerners make softer Yorkshire puddings.
Despite popular belief, there is no record of the dish ever being made with toads!