Does anyone have an idea why this name should be given to this long-standing English supper dish of braised sausages in batter? I couldn’t find a derivation in the Concise OD, nor any other dictionary I consulted. (Guess what I had for my dinner tonight.)
It might be interesting to know how old the expression is. I suspect it’s just a visual metaphor, with the sausage inside the dish. Unknown on this side of the Atlantic. We do have “pigs in a blanket” which as I recall is sausage surrounded by pancakes and smothered in (usually) artificial maple syrup. You won’t need “spotted dick” after eating that.
Oddly, the OED has it only as “a name applied to various games, esp. a form of hide-and-seek and a game in which lead discs are thrown at holes in a wooden structure.” (First citation 1930.)
Well, that’s interesting. My stepmother’s father was an Oklahoman and an inveterate story teller. “It ain’t a lie if it’s got some truth to it” was one of his sayings. One evening he got off on a reptile/amphibian tangent and started talking about a man who was plowing some bottom land that hadn’t been farmed in quite some time. As the farmer was coursing through the grass he hit a large stone with the blade of the plow and it knocked the plow aside. He had to re-align the horse and as he did so he noticed blood coming out of the stone. When he looked closer it turned out to be a large “terrapin” half -buried in the dirt that only looked like a rock. It had been at least a hundred years before that since the field had been flooded by river water overflowing its banks, and since the terrapin was a water animal it must have lain there ever since.
Then he said he knew a feller who was walking downtown when they were building the new courthouse. Just as he passed, they were laying the cornerstone of the building and the mason saw a toad lying in the dirt and picked it up and through it in the ce-ment where they laid the cornerstone. That same feller was walking by the courthouse when they were tearing it down more than fifty years later and when they broke open the cornerstone that toad was just staring at them with its eyes wide open.
I remember stories in my youth about putting what we called a “horny toad” (Desert Horned Lizard) in a cornerstone and it would live for 50 to 60 years, but I never saw one recovered. I never saw the corpse of one either.
You’re right, it was a horned toad. Now that I think about it that was more or less the point of the story, the animal being a reptile. I heard it more than twenty years ago.
Oddly, the OED has it only as “a name applied to various games, esp. a form of hide-and-seek and a game in which lead discs are thrown at holes in a wooden structure.” (First citation 1930.)
It is there, in the entry previous to the game.
6. a. Cookery. toad in the ({dag}a) hole: meat, now usu. sausages, baked in batter.
1787 GROSE Prov. Gloss., Pudding-Pye-Doll, the dish called toad-in-a-hole, meat boiled in a crust. Norf. 1797 F. BURNEY Lett. Dec., Mrs. Siddons and Sadler’s Wells..seems..as illfitted as the dish they call a toad in a hole,..putting a noble sirloin of beef into a poor paltry batter-pudding
Huh! Then I emend my statement to “Oddly, the OED has it as a separate entry only as a term for a game, hiding the more common culinary sense in the toad entry.”
Then he said he knew a feller who was walking downtown when they were building the new courthouse. Just as he passed, they were laying the cornerstone of the building and the mason saw a toad lying in the dirt and picked it up and through it in the ce-ment where they laid the cornerstone. That same feller was walking by the courthouse when they were tearing it down more than fifty years later and when they broke open the cornerstone that toad was just staring at them with its eyes wide open
Sounds like a Warner Bros. cartoon to me. The toad didn’t begin to sing, did it?
