Earlier this week I posted a historical orchard recipe for ‘Nottingham Pudding‘ from William Kitchiner’s 1823 recipe book The Cook’s Oracle. It’s essentially a toad-in-the-hole batter pudding, but made with apples instead of sausages.
It also occurred to me that you could try making it with both apples and sausages. Or – as my boss at Ordsall Hall, Jo Green, suggested when I mentioned it to her during a tea break at work – you could go the whole hog and use apples stuffed with sausages…
…and she did! She stuffed the apples with sausage meat, cooked them through in the oven, and then added in the batter mix for the last few minutes, to avoid it over-cooking. Here, with Jo’s permission, are the before and slightly-after cooking pics (Jo says that batter was puffed up a treat but sank a bit as it cooled).
And the verdict? “It wasn’t bad. Not great, but not grim either.”
Fair enough. Maybe it needs gravy. Toad-in-the-hole just isn’t right without lashings of onion gravy, but I suppose in this case the apples would lose their shape and go to mush. Although actually, that might not be such a bad thing… apple and onion gravy? Yeah, I could go for that. (Turns out, so did Jo. But only because there weren’t any baked beans in the house. Also a good and valid side-dish option.)
Jo also saved one of the Ordsall Hog Puddings (minus the batter, as gluten and I are not good friends) and brought it in for me to try. And it was… delicious! Seriously, the combination of cold pork sausages and cold baked apple really, really works. So much so that I’d be tempted to bake a few apples stuffed with sausage meat just on their own and leave them to cool off again. Lovely stuff.
My thanks to Jo for trying out her new version of William Kitchiner’s recipe, for sending me the pics and for bringing one in for lunch. Much appreciated, boss!
If you’d like to join in as well, by trying out any of the historical orchard recipes I’ve posted, please do take a few pics and send them in, along with your dish-making and food-tasting notes, via the email address on the contact info page and I’ll write up and post the results for you.