Toad-in-the-hole is a British home-cooked dish: sausages baked inside a thick batter of eggs, milk and flour. The batter puffs up tall and golden in the hot oven while the sausages sit half-buried in it, and the brown ends poking through are supposedly the 'toads' looking out of their 'holes' — nobody is quite sure whether that is the real reason for the name, but it is the story everyone tells. It is cheap, filling, family food, usually eaten in the evening with gravy and vegetables, and it belongs to cold weather. The batter is the same mixture used for Yorkshire pudding, so if you know that, you already know half the recipe. The name is always written with hyphens and used as one uncountable thing: we had toad-in-the-hole, not 'a toad in the hole'. It is well known across Britain and almost unknown elsewhere, so outside Britain you may need to explain it — and be ready for the first reaction, because people who have never met it genuinely wonder whether there is an animal in there.