A toad in a hole — that piece of bread with a hole cut out with a fried egg in the middle — sure does come with some alternate nomenclature. Since our earlier discussion, listeners have sent us many other names for it, including fish in a pond, bread-frame egg, television egg, and one-eyed Egyptian. The more terms, the better, so keep ’em coming! This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Egg in Bread Slice Food Names”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
What do you call it when you cut a hole in a piece of bread, drop a raw egg into it, and then fry it all up?
Yum.
Yes, that too. But you may remember, Grant, that on an earlier show we talked about several terms for this, including, what, gas house eggs, toad in the hole, hole in one, pirate’s eye, one-eyed jack, and the incredibly appetizing name for a breakfast treat, spit in the ocean.
Yeah.
I thought we’d covered every single name there could possibly be for that dish, but no.
No, we put the call out to you and we got lots and lots more.
Mark Pashan of Winston-Salem, North Carolina writes, camping with Boy Scouts circa 1967 in Connecticut, we bit the hole in the center of the bread and ate it, and then put the hole in the pan to cook and called it fish in a pond.
Oh, and they put the egg in the hole that they bit out of the bread.
Yeah.
Okay, fish in the pond.
Yeah, good times.
And then Ed Hines from Roswell, Georgia wrote, didn’t realize that the egg and bread dish you talked about had any other name. In New England, we called this a bread frame egg, which sort of fits with the person who wrote to tell us that they used to call them television eggs.
Because of the frame.
Yeah.
Picture in the middle.
I love that.
That’s great.
And let’s see.
Penny Stowherd from Michigan wrote that she learned about these from the La Leche League cookbook, where they’re called UFOs, unidentified frying objects.
And we also heard lots more names. We heard owl’s eye, kitty winky, hobo eggs, a top hat, egg in a nest, bird in a nest, and one of my favorites, one-eyed Egyptian.
You know, like the ancient Egyptian art, you know, where you only see the one eye.
And Grant, I guess the larger question here is why so many names for this one dish?
I wonder if it just keeps being reinvented.
And so when you reinvent it, you get the opportunity to name it.
That’s right. Mom’s sick. Dad doesn’t know what to do in the kitchen.
And so he just…
I know.
No, it’s the other way around.
Mom’s a genius.
She knows how to feed the family something yummy.
Yeah, but I think maybe that’s it, that the wheel just keeps getting invented and invented.
Food and language, they go together like ham and eggs.
Email us, words@waywordradio.org.
