Just a very quick message to let you all know that the 10th season of The British Food History Podcast starts next month. Check out the trailer, via this Spotify embed.
So, there will be much podcast content to download and listen to over the next few months.
If you don’t already, please subscribe to the podcasts on your favourite podcast app.
Over and out!
Neil xx
If you can, support the podcast and blogs by becoming a £3 monthly subscriber, and unlock lots of premium content, including bonus blog posts and recipes, access to the Easter eggs, a monthly newsletter and the secret podcast, or treat me to a one-off virtual pint or coffee: click here.
I have now cooked all 16 recipes in the Lamb & Mutton section of English Food by Jane Grigson!
There were highs, there were lows. And there was lamb’s head in brain sauce. It had it all. Read my review of the section on the other blog Neil Cook Grigson.
Toad-in-the-hole is a stone-cold classic British dish, and one I make often. It occurred to me recently that I’ve never written up my recipe, so I thought I should rectify this! It is considered by other nations to be one of those ‘weird’ British foods – I’ve no idea why, it’s roasted sausages in a Yorkshire pudding. What’s not to like? Do folk think there is a real toad in there?
Find out more about Yorkshire puddings and toad-in-the-hole in this previous podcast episode.
Well, naysayers, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it: it’s a delicious, simple, hearty and economical pleasure, as most British food is, and I think it is a meal most Brits would rate very highly. It wasn’t always the case, as Jane Grigson points out in English Food, the ‘toads’ were pieces of leftover boiled or roasted meat or poor quality sausages which ‘gave Toad-in-the-Hole a bad name as one of the meaner English dishes.’[1] Economical should never be made equivalent to mean.
Looking into the history of toad-in-the-hole presents us with a quandary, because it is rather difficult to pin down when it first appears in print. Why? Well, it depends on your criteria. Let’s start with what is widely regarded to be the first recipe with that name (well, actually it’s called toad-in-a-hole, but let’s not split hairs), which crops up in Richard Briggs’ The English Art of Cookery, published in 1788:
Mix a pound of flour with a pint of and a half of milk and four eggs into a batter, put in a little salt, beaten ginger, and a little grated nutmeg, put it into a deep dish that you intend to send it to table in, take a veiny piece of beef, sprinkle it with salt, put it into the batter, bake it two hours, and send it up hot.[2]
So, here we have a single large toad in the form of a piece of beef. This makes sense; the dish is called toad-in-the-hole, not toads-in-the-hole. In The Tavern Cook, Marc Meltonville does make the point that it is baked,[3] which is important because the earliest mention of toad-in-the-hole actually comes the year before in Francis Grose’s Provincial Glossary, where it is described as ‘meat boiled in a crust’.[4] Are either of these really toad-in-the-hole recipes? There is a better contender in my book. It’s not a recipe, but a good description of one, and it can be found within the pages of the diary of shopkeeper Thomas Turner, dated Saturday, 9th of February 1765:
I dined on a sausage batter pudding baked (which is this: a little flour and milk beat up into a batter with an egg and some salt and a few sausages cut into pieces and put in it and baked)…[5]
This – I hope you agree – is a modern toad-in-the-hole in all but name!
Find out more about Richard Briggs and his book in this previous podcast episode.
We can go even further than this: some food historians think that the original recipe actually goes back another 20 years to Hannah Glasse’s 1747 classic The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy.[6] The recipe is for ‘Pigeons in a Hole’. Here, pigeons are buttered and seasoned, popped into a dish and a batter is poured over them and baked.[7] Is this the winner? Well it all depends what you are counting as toad-in-the-hole, of course, but I hope this gives you an overview of the dish’s evolution.
In the 19th century, various other ‘toads’ were used: Mrs Beeton gives recipes using beef steak and pieces of kidney. She also suggests adding mushrooms or oysters, and also recommends using leftover, underdone meat.[8] According to Sheila Hutchins, even whole, boned chickens have played the part of the toad.[9] I must say that this sounds most appealing!
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Recipe
I used my 10-inch Netherton Foundry Prospector Pan throughout because it can be used on the hob and in the oven. It’s also round, which makes portioning much easier when it comes to serving time. The amounts given for the batter are the same as for my Yorkshire pudding recipe, so you could make the toad-in-the-hole in a rectangular tray or even a sturdy cake tin. Colour the sausages in a frying pan first and then transfer them to your chosen receptacle!
¾ cup/180 ml plain flour
½ tsp salt
¾ cup/180 ml eggs (around 4 medium eggs)
¾ cup milk
60 g beef dripping or lard, or 60 ml sunflower or rapeseed oil
6 good quality sausages
Mix the flour and salt together, make a well in the centre and add the eggs. Beat well until smooth, then beat in the milk. Set aside for an hour (you don’t have to do this, but you do get a slightly better rise this way).
Preheat your oven to 230°C.
Heat a little of the fat or oil in your pan and brown the sausages on two sides: you’re not looking to cook them, just to sear them, as it were. Remove the sausages and set aside.
Add the remaining fat to the pan or tray in which you’ll be baking the toad-in-the hole (along with any juices from the frying pan, if used), place in the oven and allow it to become very hot and smoking– a good 15 minutes. Gingerly remove the pan or tray and add a ladleful of batter to it, and give it a quick swirl before returning it to the oven to cook and set for 3 or 4 minutes.
Remove the pan or tray, arrange the sausages evenly and neatly and pour over the rest of the batter. Return to the oven. Do all of this as quickly – and safely – as possible.
Bake for 30 minutes until well risen and a deep-golden brown. If the pudding and sausages are going a bit too brown for your liking, turn the heat down to 180°C.
Serve with plenty of onion gravy, steamed vegetables and a blob of mustard.
Notes
[1] Grigson, J. (1992). English Food (Third Edit). Penguin.
[2] This is Marc Meltonville’s transcription from his 2023 book The Tavern Cook: Eighteenth Century Dining through the Recipes of Richard Briggs published by Prospect Books
[4] Grose, F. (1790). A provincial glossary: with a collection of local proverbs, and popular superstitions (2nd ed.). S. Hooper.
[5] Turner, T. (1994). The diary of Thomas Turner, 1754-1765 (D. Vaisey, Ed.). CTR Publishing.
[6] One of the food historians in question is Alan Davidson, in The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford University Press (1999).
[7] Glasse, H. (1747). The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. Prospect Books.
[8] Beeton, I. (1861). The Book of Household Management. Lightning Source.
[9] Hutchins, S. (1967). English Recipes, and others from Scotland, Wales and Ireland as they appeared in eighteenth and nineteenth century cookery books and now devised for modern use. Cookery Book Club.
Chicken Balmoral is a modern British classic: a chicken breast stuffed with haggis, wrapped in bacon and then either oven-roasted or pan-fried. It’s served with a rich whisky cream sauce. You can’t stuff a great deal of haggis into a chicken breast, so I find it a great way of using up leftover haggis after a Burns supper. It’s also a great dish to serve up to those uninitiated in the pleasures of the Chieftain of the Pudding Race.
If you want to know more about Robert Burns, the first Burns suppers and the history of this haggis, listen to the first part of my two-part Burns Night specials on The British Food History Podcast:
Despite its name, chicken Balmoral isn’t particularly old; it sounds like it should be Victorian, it being named after Queen Victoria’s beloved Balmoral Castle, nestled in the beautiful Cairngorms. But, no, it is most definitely a 20th-century invention – the earliest mention I could find of a dish called chicken Balmoral is in the 1928 publication A Book of Empire Dinners (published by the Empire Marketing Board of Great Britain), but it is only a mention, not a description.1 It is also conspicuous by its absence from F. Marion McNeill’s The Scot’s Kitchen, which certainly tells us something about its position in traditional Scottish cuisine.2 As Ben Mervis put it in The British Cook Book ‘[it] seems a little too cute – a little too on the nose – to be a truly traditional Scottish dish.’3
Ben came on the podcast to talk about The British Cook Book. Stream it via this embed.
It seems to me that it is a dish created for restaurant service; the use of a prime cut, the fact that most of the prep can be done well ahead of time, and that there is next to no waste, all certainly point to the fact. It does, however, make chicken Balmoral an excellent dish for a dinner party. You won’t be slaving over a hot stove making this meal, that’s for sure.
If you like the blogs and podcast I produce, please consider treating me to a virtual coffee or pint, or even a £3 monthly subscription, where you will receive access to the secret podcast, a monthly newsletter and other premium content: follow this link for more information.
Recipe
Chicken Balmoral is “traditionally” served with seasonal vegetables; however, for my version, I chose to eat it with the classic Burns Night supper companions of mashed neeps and tatties – i.e. mashed swede and potatoes.
Serves four, but it can be very easily proportioned for more or fewer folk.
For the chicken
3 tbs flavourless cooking oil, lard or bacon fat (or a mixture)
Around 160 g leftover haggis
4 chicken breasts
16 rashers of dry-cured streaky bacon
For the whisky sauce
30g butter
½ onion or the white part of a leek, thinly sliced
3 to 4 tbs whisky
150ml very hot chicken stock
100ml double cream
Salt and pepper
Preheat your oven to 200°C. Add the fats and/or oil to a roasting tin and place on the middle shelf to get really nice and hot.
Lay the chicken breasts smooth side down on a chopping board. Move the tender out of the way (it’s sometimes partially attached and can get in the way). Press a breast down firmly with the palm of your hand, and, using a small, sharp, pointed knife, cut into the thick end of the breast as far as you can without puncturing the breast as it tapers toward the end. Widen the hole slightly – it needs to be about 2 centimetres wide at the mouth. Repeat with the other three breasts.
Divide the haggis into four equal pieces and roll each piece into a sausage shape, thin enough to insert into the chicken. Some haggises are quite crumbly, but don’t worry if they are not pliable enough. Use your forefinger to force the haggis into the cuts in the breasts. You might find it easier to break the haggis into smaller pieces.
Prepping the chicken breasts
Take four rashers of bacon and lay them across your chopping board lengthways, so that they overlap just slightly. Lay the chicken breast perpendicular to the bacon rashers and roll it up so that the join is underneath the chicken breast. Trim away excess bacon. Repeat with the remaining chicken breasts.
By now, the fat or oil will have become very hot indeed. Take the tin out of the oven (careful!) and sit the breasts in the hot fat, thin ends pointing inwards (this ensures they don’t overcook). Place in the oven for the oven for 30 – 35 minutes, turning it down to 180°C after 15 minutes. Baste at least twice whilst they cook. Remove and allow to rest on a plate.
The cooked chicken straight out of the oven (notice the nice burnt bits in the tin); making the sauce
Meanwhile, make the sauce: melt the butter in a saucepan and fry the onion or leek until soft, but not browned (this will take around 8 minutes) before adding three tablespoons of the whisky. Pour the excess fat from the roasting tin and deglaze it with the chicken stock. Scrape all of the nice salty burnt bits with a wooden spoon and cast them into the saucepan. Simmer for a further five minutes before passing through a sieve into a clean saucepan. Add the cream, heat to simmering point and season to taste with salt, pepper and more whisky (if needed).
Serve the chicken with mashed neeps and tatties and pour the sauce into a warm gravy boat.
References
1. A Book of Empire Dinners. (Empire Marketing Board, 1928).
2. McNeill, F. M. The Scots Kitchen: Its Lore & Recipes. (Blackie & Son Limited, 1968).
3. Mervis, B. The British Cook Book. (Phaidon, 2022).
Welcome to the first of a two-part special all about Burns Night.
Burns Night, celebrated on Robert Burns’ birthday, 25th January, is a worldwide phenomenon and I wanted to make a couple of episodes focussing upon the night, the haggis, but also the other foods links regarding Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns.
The episode is available on all podcast apps, but can also be streamed here:
Burns was born in Alloway, Ayrshire on 25 January 1759 and he died in Dumfries on 21 July 1796 at just 37 years old.
My guest today is food historian Jennie Hood, who has written an excellent article for the most recent edition of food history journal Petit Propos Culinares, entitled ‘A History of Haggis and the Burns Night Tradition’, so she is the perfect person to speak with on this topic.
Jennie’s experiments in haggis: It shows (clockwise from top left) Richard Bradley’s 1732 hackin, Mrs MacIver’s 1774 haggis, Henry Blaxton’s 1659 liver pudding and a franchemoyle from Liber Cure Cocorum, English c. 1440. Images: Jennie Hood
Jennie Hood hails from Ayrshire, just like Robert Burns, and we talk about the origin of Burns Night, but we also talk about the medieval origins of the most important food item on the Burns supper plate – the haggis.
Things covered include the first English recipes for haggis, what makes a haggis a haggis (not as easy a thing as you might expect), Burns’s poem Address to a Haggis and what it tells us about haggises in Burns’s day and how the first Burns suppers started and gained such popularity, amongst many other things.
If you can, support the podcast and blogs by becoming a £3 monthly subscriber, and unlock lots of premium content, including bonus blog posts and recipes, access to the easter eggs and the secret podcast, or treat me to a one-off virtual pint or coffee: click here.
Don’t forget, there will be postbag episodes in the future, so if you have any questions or queries about today’s episode, or indeed any episode, or have a question about the history of British food please email me at neil@britishfoodhistory.com, or on twitter and BlueSky @neilbuttery, or Instagram and Threads dr_neil_buttery. My DMs are open.
Well, cheerio 2025, it was nice knowing you, but it’s time to move on to 2026 – I must admit, I’m both glad and sad to see it go.
2025 was the year I took time off from writing books (writing two at the same time in 2024-5 required some time away). This doesn’t mean that I took a year off writing: I wrote several pieces for BBC Countryfile Magazine, including one about Plough Monday and Plough Pudding which will appear in the January 2026 edition of the magazine. There was the County Foods series for Country Life too, of course.
My New Year’s pudding this year was a good old rice pudding – with an excellent skin!
I worked with the Museum of Royal Worcester on another project about historic ices and the ways in which they were prepared and served. The previous project ‘Dr Wall’s Dinner’ won the Food on Display award at the inaugural British Library Food Season Awards 2025. I will be teaming up with Paul Crane (who you might remember appeared on the podcast in 2025) to give a talk about the history of sugar and the effect sugar production had on the porcelain manufactory at Worcester porcelain. This talk takes place online in March and will be free to attend. Keep a lookout on the Events page – I’ll update it when I know more details.
I made my first live television appearance in November on Sky News to talk about the history of mince pies – very scary, but I must admit, I did enjoy it!
A clip of my appearance on Sky News talking about mince pies.
I also contributed to the Channel 5 series Royal Births, Marriages and Deaths talking about the death of Henry I and his surfeit of lampreys – the episode will be shown in January or February 2026, so keep a lookout for it.
This year also saw the launch of the secret podcast for monthly subscribers.
If you like the blogs and podcast I produce, please consider treating me to a virtual coffee or pint, or even a £3 monthly subscription, where you will receive access to the secret podcast, a monthly newsletter and other premium content: follow this link for more information.
There was ‘Season B’ of A is for Apple: An Encyclopaedia of Food & Drink, too of course, which I co-host with Sam Bilton and Alessandra Pino, which is really gaining popularity now, so if you haven’t checked it out before, please do.
Perhaps the most exciting thing to happen this year was the very first Serve it Forth Food History Festival in October. It was an online event organised by Sam Bilton, Thomas Ntinas, Alessandra Pino and me. It was a fantastic day, and I’m so glad to have seen so many readers of the blog and listeners to the podcasts there. We all organised our own sessions and I was very lucky to have food writer and broadcaster Tom Parker Bowles as a guest. There was also a mini Christmas special looking at the darker side of Christmas and how food plays a role. The four of us are meeting up soon to discuss what will be happening for the next event.
White pudding ice cream served with early modern black pudding
Of course, I would be doing none of these things if it wasn’t for all of you fantastic people who read, cook, listen, watch and interact with me, so thank you all for your support, it really does mean a lot.
What about the coming year? Well I have already organised interviews for season 10 of The British Food History Podcast, A is for Apple will certainly be returning, and I will be beginning a brand new book in 2026 – I shall tell you about it as things develop.
After the roaring success of my blood ice cream, I decided to have a crack at making a white pudding ice cream too, using the flavours in Gervase Markham’s recipe.
The blood ice cream was great, but I didn’t call it black pudding ice cream, because I left out one important ingredient: oats. The flavour of wholegrain oats is key, so much so that without them, I don’t think I captured the pudding’s true flavour.
I wanted to change this with this ice cream, but the challenge was to capture the flavour of oats without any annoying frozen groats getting in the way. I decided to take pinhead (steel-cut) oats, soak them in milk and then squeeze it out to create an oat-flavoured milk. This worked really well. I added this to the usual milk and cream to make a custard, warmed it up with the spices and found that it naturally thickened to just the right consistency – all without egg yolks! The mixture froze very well and produced a super-smooth final product. As you can imagine, I was very pleased with this outcome.
Just like the blood ice cream, I soaked some dried fruit in sherry – currants and dates this time, as per Markam’s recipe and stirred them through at the soft-scoop stage of the churning process.
I served my white pudding ice cream with sweet black pudding that had been fried in butter and sugar. I then fried a slice of bread in the sugary and buttery juices and popped the black pudding on top with an accompanying scoop of the white pudding ice cream. It was decadent and delicious!
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It’s time for the now traditional end-of-season postbag episode of The British Food History Podcast, where I (attempt to) answer your questions, read out your comments and mull over your queries.
I’ll be disappearing for a couple of months, unless of course, you are a monthly subscriber, where there will be a bonus episode coming up for you to listen to via the website: Keeping Food Traditions Alive with Tom Parker Bowles, which was recorded live at the Serve it Forth Food History Festival on 18 October.
The British Food History Podcast is available on all podcast platforms. Please subscribe, rate and review. Alternatively, stream the episode via this Spotify embed:
If you can, support the podcast and blogs by becoming a £3 monthly subscriber, and unlock lots of premium content, including bonus blog posts and recipes, access to the Easter eggs and the secret podcast, or treat me to a one-off virtual pint or coffee please click here.
Remember: Fruit Pig are sponsoring the 9th season of the podcast. Visit their website www.fruitpig.co.uk to learn more about them, their journey, to find your local stockist and access their online shop.
Don’t forget, there will be postbag episodes in the future, so if you have any questions or queries about today’s episode, or indeed any episode, or have a question about the history of British food please email me at neil@britishfoodhistory.com, or on twitter and BlueSky @neilbuttery, or Instagram and Threads dr_neil_buttery. My DMs are open.
Earlier in the year, the fantastic Fruitpig(sponsors of the ninth season of the podcast) very kindly sent me some fresh pig’s blood so that I could try my hand at making some early modern black puddings, inspired by the recipes of Robert May, Kenelm Digby and Thomas Dawson. I made two versions: a savoury one and another sweetened with sugar and currants – both turned out to be delicious.
Listen to the episode of the podcast with Matthew and Grant aka Fruitpig!
A few years ago I read (I forget where) that blood thickens upon heating just like egg yolks, and I had an idea in the back of my mind that blood ice cream might be possible to make, knowing already that the black puddings of the early modern period were often sweet.
Please that the sweet black puddings tasted good, I set about to see if I could find any British examples of blood ice cream or, at least, something similar. I couldn’t find anything. However, I did discover in the pages of Jennifer McLagan’s excellent offal cookbook Odd Bits, a blood and chocolate ice cream recipe, adapted from an Italian set dessert called sanguinaccio alla Neapolitana: little pots of set chocolate custard, thickened with blood instead of egg yolks.
Encouraged by the fact I knew it could be done, I went about adapting my black pudding recipe into an ice cream. I have a good, basic vanilla ice cream recipe that I’ve been using for years, which in turn is based on my custard recipe, and all I did was swap out the eight egg yolks for 200 ml of pig’s blood. Not convinced that the blood would thicken things sufficiently, I popped in two egg yolks for good measure. The milk and cream were flavoured not with a vanilla pod, but the same aromatics as the black pudding: pepper, cloves, mace and dried mixed herbs. I really wanted to include the currants, but knowing they would freeze hard into bullets, I thought an overnight soak in some sherry would work well – not unlike modern rum and raisin ice cream. I chose sherry because it’s the closest thing we have to sack, the popular fortified wine of the early modern period, and a common addition to recipes.
Well, I am very pleased to say that it was a great success. It was the richest ice cream I have ever eaten: luxurious, aromatic and with a very slight metallic tang. I ate a scoop with one of my early modern white puddings. What a combination!
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Ingredients
300 ml milk
300 ml cream seeds
½ tsp bl peppercorns
1 tsp fennel
½ tsp cloves
2 blades of mace
1 tsp dried mixed herbs
200 ml fresh blood
2 egg yolks
160 g sugar
50 g currants
a few tablespoons of sweet or medium sherry overnight
Method
Pour the milk and cream into a saucepan. Crack the peppercorns and bruise the remaining spices in a pestle and mortar, and add to the milk and cream along with the dried herbs. Mix well, making sure everything has been submerged, and warm the mixture over a medium-low heat and bring everything to scalding point – i.e. just before the milk and cream boil.
Meanwhile, add the blood, egg yolks and sugar to a mixing bowl and whisk together well.
When the mix and cream mixture reaches scalding point, remove the pan from the heat and whisk in around a quarter of it into the blood mixture. When everything is incorporated, beat in the rest of the cream mixture, and pour the whole thing back into the saucepan.
The cooled blood-custard base and the macerated currants
Now keep whisking or stirring until the temperature reaches 80°C – you can tell this temperature is reached because the mixture thickens noticeably and coats the back of a spoon (check with a difital thermometer, if unsure). Take off the heat and pass the whole thing through a sieve into a clean bowl or tub. Leave to cool and refrigerate overnight. Soak the currants in sherry and leave those to macerate overnight too.
Next day, churn the mixture in an ice cream machine until a very thick soft-scoop consistency. As you wait, strain the currants (keep the sherry and drink it!). When the ice cream is almost ready, add the currants.
Pour the mixture into tubs and store in the freezer. Eaten within 3 months.
The ice cream ready to receive its currants and my serving suggestion!
My guest on The British Food History Podcast today is food historian and friend of the show Sam Bilton, podcaster and author of Much Ado About Cooking Delicious Shakespearean Feasts for Every Occasion, published by Headline and commissioned by Shakespeare’s Globe.
It was, of course, a great opportunity to talk about the food of Shakespearean England as well as the food and drink references in Shakespeare’s plays, and what they meant to those watching the plays at the time they were first performed.
A small selection of the wonderful photography from Sam’s book
We talked about lots of cookery manuscripts, the importance of keeping historical recipes relevant, capons, Early Modern bread and greedy Falstaff’s sack, amongst many other things.
The British Food History Podcast is available on all apps, or stream it here:
Those listening to the secret podcast can hear about horrible, sweet spinach tarts, Early Modern cakes, possets and more!
Remember: Fruit Pig are sponsoring the 9th season of the podcast. Visit their website www.fruitpig.co.uk to learn more about them, their journey, to find your local stockist and access their online shop.
If you can, support the podcast and blogs by becoming a £3 monthly subscriber, and unlock lots of premium content, including bonus blog posts and recipes, access to the easter eggs and the secret podcast, or treat me to a one-off virtual pint or coffee: click here.
Don’t forget, there will be postbag episodes in the future, so if you have any questions or queries about today’s episode, or indeed any episode, or have a question about the history of British food please email me at neil@britishfoodhistory.com, or leave a comment below.
British Food: A History 