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BLACK PUDDINGS (English method)
Throw a little salt into a quart of warm hog's blood, and stir until the blood is cold. Mix with it a quart of whole groats which have been soaked in cold water all night. Add the grated crumb of a quartern loaf soaked in two quarts of hot milk until the milk is absorbed. Prepare a seasoning of chopped thyme, onion, pennyroyal, six pounded cloves, half a nutmeg grated, and a quarter of an ounce each of pounded all-spice and ginger. Stir this into the groats, bread-crumbs, and blood, and add two pounds of finely chopped beef suet and six well-beaten eggs. Cut one pound of the inward fat of the pig into very small dice. Having washed the skins thoroughly tie them at one end and turn them inside out. Only half fill them with the mixture, to allow room for swelling, and put in the fat at regular intervals. Tie them in equal lengths or rounds, fasten the ends securely, put them into boiling water, and boil very gently for an hour, taking care to prick them to let out the air. When done, hang them in a cool dry place. When wanted for use, boil a few minutes, or toast in a Dutch oven. Cost, about 4d. per pound.
This is a full-size Victorian blood pudding, scaled for a household with a pig on the premises. Two elements put it outside modern practice: the pennyroyal in the seasoning and the raw blood at the centre of the method. The notes below explain the terms and the specific problems rather than offering a revised version.
- PennyroyalMentha pulegium was a standard English pudding-herb, and it is the reason this recipe cannot be recommended. Its principal constituent, pulegone, is hepatotoxic and is a known abortifacient; the herb is no longer regarded as a food ingredient, and its oil has caused fatal poisonings. There is no established safe culinary dose.
- Raw hog's bloodThe recipe assumes blood drawn minutes earlier from an animal killed at home, salted and stirred to stop it clotting. Blood is an excellent bacterial growth medium and will not keep; it also carries the pathogen load of the animal it came from. Modern black pudding production depends on inspected blood handled under refrigeration and either used within hours or frozen, which no domestic instruction here addresses.
- Curing by hanging"Hang them in a cool dry place" was a workable direction in an unheated larder in winter and is not one in a modern house. The puddings are a moist, low-acid, low-salt meat product with no measured cure, so ambient storage is not defensible. If you want to make black pudding, use a current recipe with weighed salt and stated temperatures.
- A quartern loafThe standard large loaf, roughly 4 lb finished weight. The recipe wants only the crumb, so the crust is discarded -- meaning something like 3 lb of soft bread absorbing two quarts of hot milk.
- GroatsWhole hulled oat kernels, sold today as oat groats. Not oatmeal and not rolled oats; they stay distinct and chewy after the overnight soak and the hour's boil, which is what gives the pudding its texture.
- Inward fatThe soft leaf fat from around the kidneys, diced and distributed in pockets rather than mixed through, so that it appears as white beads in the slice.
- Dutch ovenHere it means the tin reflector screen stood before an open fire, not a cast-iron pot. Its use for reheating tells you the pudding was made in quantity and eaten over days, sliced and browned as needed.
- ScaleA quart of blood, a quart of groats, two quarts of milk, some 3 lb of bread crumb and 3 lb of fat between the suet and the inward fat -- something on the order of fifteen pounds of pudding.
Blood puddings are among the oldest recorded sausages in Europe, and in England they were associated with the pig-killing, a late-autumn event in which nothing was allowed to go to waste: the blood was caught and stirred while still warm, because a clotted batch was a lost one. Cassell's gives this as the "English method", and its distinguishing marks here are the whole oat groats and the heavy bread panade. The herb mixture -- thyme, onion, pennyroyal -- recurs in English cookery books from the seventeenth century onward; pennyroyal was known in some counties as pudding-grass from its use in puddings. The costing of about fourpence a pound places the pudding among the cheaper cooked meats a Victorian household could put on the table.