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BLACK PUDDINGS (a la Francaise)
Mince four large onions very fine, and stew them in lard with a tea-spoonful of minced parsley, pepper, salt, and allspice to taste, and a quarter of a pound of pork fat, cut into small dice. Stir two pints of pig's blood, while-hot, with a little vinegar, a table-spoonful to a quart to prevent clotting, and mix it well with the seasoning. Fill the skins and divide them by strings into the length wished; they may be stewed for twenty minutes, or merely thrown into boiling water till firm. To try if they are sufficiently done, a large needle is used: if only fat flows they may be hung up to dry; they should then be rubbed over with butter, and tied up in a muslin bag, to give them a glossy appearance. When used they should be boiled long enough to heat them through, or cut into slices and fried.
This is boudin noir in its nineteenth-century domestic form, written for a household with a pig, a cool larder and no expectation of refrigeration. The cooking is straightforward; the handling and keeping are where it fails by current standards.
- The hinge, and why it breaksThe instruction that decides everything here is the last stage: poach until firm, prove with a needle, then hang up to dry and store in a muslin bag at room temperature. A moist, low-acid, low-salt blood sausage held at ambient temperature is close to an ideal growth medium for Clostridium botulinum and for Clostridium perfringens, both of which survive a gentle poach as spores and grow inside the casing where there is no oxygen. Nothing later in the recipe corrects that.
- No cure and no measured saltTraditional keeping sausages rely on a weighed cure — salt at a stated percentage of total weight, with nitrite where the product is to be stored — plus controlled temperature and humidity. This recipe gives "salt to taste" and no curing agent at all, so there is no way to reconstruct a safe formulation from what is on the page.
- The blood itselfFresh pig's blood is among the most perishable of all butcher's materials; it begins to spoil within hours and carries whatever the slaughter floor carried. The recipe assumes blood taken minutes earlier from your own animal. Blood sold for food today is collected under inspection, chilled hard and dated, and is not intended to be held warm while onions stew.
- The needle test is not a doneness test"If only fat flows" tells you the blood has set and the casing is not leaking. It says nothing about the internal temperature reached, which is the only thing that matters for pathogens, and it was never meant to.
- The vinegarA tablespoon to the quart is there purely to delay clotting so the mixture can be stirred and filled. It is far too little to acidify the sausage or contribute anything to its keeping.
- If you want black puddingUse a current recipe from a source that gives weighed salt, a stated internal temperature, chilled handling throughout and refrigerated or frozen storage. Buying it from a butcher who makes it under inspection is the simpler route.
Blood sausage is about as old as butchery: a version turns up in the Odyssey, where a stomach stuffed with blood and fat is turned over the fire, and the form survives across Europe as boudin noir, morcilla, blutwurst, kaszanka and the British black pudding. Cassell's flags this one "a la Francaise" because the French style leans on sweated onion, parsley and diced back fat rather than the oatmeal or barley that bulks out the northern English and Irish versions. The pig-killing context explains everything odd about the method: blood had to be caught, stirred and used the same day, and the finished links were hung — plausibly, though the books do not say so, for want of anywhere cold to put them. That practice also gave us a word — botulism takes its name from botulus, Latin for sausage, after nineteenth-century German outbreaks traced to smoked blood sausage and studied by the physician Justinus Kerner, who called the agent Wurstgift, sausage poison.