Important: Safety Warning
This page describes preparations historically taken to end pregnancy or "bring on the menses." These substances do not work as claimed and are seriously toxic; their use has caused poisoning and death.
In addition, this page prescribes plants as medicine according to pre-modern medical theory. Several of the plants named are toxic, correct identification is difficult, and the doses given have no scientific basis. Do not ingest or apply any preparation described here.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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PORK BLACK PUDDING (another way)
Prepare the skins. (See the preceding recipe.) Put a little salt into the warm blood, and stir until it is cold. Boil a quart of half grits until tender in as much milk as will cover them all the time. Drain them, and mix with them half a pound of bread-crumbs which have been soaked in about half a pint of hot milk until all of it was absorbed, a pint of cream, and as much blood as will make the pudding a dark colour. Add a pound of finely-shredded suet and a dessert-spoonful each of chopped sage, thyme, marjoram, pennyroyal, and onion, with a table-spoonful of parsley, and a seasoning made of two tea-spoonfuls of salt, one of pepper, six cloves, and a quarter of an ounce each of pounded nutmeg, ginger, and allspice. Mix all thoroughly with eight well-beaten eggs. Cut two pounds of the inward fat of the pig into pieces the size of a large bean. Half fill the skins, put in the fat at regular intervals, and tie the pudding in equal lengths. Put these into hot water, boil five minutes, then prick and boil them again half an hour. Serve as before directed. Probable cost, 5s. Sufficient for twelve persons.
PORK BLACK PUDDINGS (another way). (See BLACK PUDDINGS, ETC.)
This is a genuine black pudding recipe, but two elements put it outside what can be recommended today: a culinary herb that is now understood to be a serious hepatotoxin, and a quantity of fresh, uncooked pig's blood handled with no temperature control at any stage.
- Pennyroyal is the disqualifying ingredientMentha pulegium and its American relative Hedeoma pulegioides contain pulegone, which is metabolised in the liver to menthofuran and causes centrilobular hepatic necrosis. A dessert-spoonful of chopped leaf divided among twelve is not a lethal dose, but pennyroyal has no safe established culinary threshold and documented fatalities exist from the oil. It is not a substitutable herb here; it is the reason this version should be left on the page and not in the pot.
- Why the warning header appearsThe boilerplate notice attached to this page is there because pennyroyal was widely used as a folk abortifacient in Britain and Ireland. Its presence in a savoury pudding is culinary rather than medicinal, but the plant is the same plant and the toxicity is the same toxicity.
- Raw blood, unmeasured and unchilledThe blood is salted, stirred until cold, and then held with cream, eggs, and grits before filling. Fresh blood is an excellent growth medium and picks up Salmonella, Yersinia enterocolitica and Campylobacter readily at slaughter. The recipe gives no chilling instruction, no interval between bleeding and use, and no source condition. Commercial black pudding is made from inspected, chilled or dried blood under monitored conditions.
- The cook time will not carry the centreFive minutes, prick, then half an hour in hot water. Skins packed only half full with two pounds of bean-sized fat lumps distributed through them heat very unevenly, and no internal temperature is named. There is no way to verify from this text that the egg-and-blood mixture ever reaches a safe core temperature.
- Casings"Prepare the skins" refers back to a preceding entry not reproduced here. Modern natural casings are cleaned, salted and sold food-safe.
- Reading the recipe as a documentFor reference only: half grits are coarsely cracked, hulled oats or barley, not American hominy grits. A quart here is the imperial 40 fl oz. The blood is specified by colour rather than volume, so nothing in the proportions can be reconstructed reliably.
- If you want black puddingUse a current recipe from a butcher or a modern charcuterie text, one that specifies blood source, chilling, and a target internal temperature.
Blood puddings are among the oldest surviving European sausages, tied to the autumn or early-winter pig killing when nothing from the carcass could be wasted and the blood had to be used quickly. Cassell's gives several versions; regional practice varied in the filler, with oatmeal and groats commonly associated with the north of England and Scotland and breadcrumbs and cream with richer styles, and here both appear at once, with a pound of suet and two pounds of leaf fat cut to bean size so the finished slices show a pattern of white against the dark. Pennyroyal was a common herb in English pudding and stuffing seasonings -- one of its old names is pudding grass -- and its reputation as a herb for "bringing on the menses" ran alongside its kitchen use. The recipe gives the cost as five shillings, sufficient for twelve persons.