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Pork Black Puddings, with Onions
Prepare the skins according to the directions given in the last recipe but one. Put a table-spoonful of vinegar into a quart of warm blood, and stir until it is cold. Cut four ounces of the inward fat of the pig into dice, and mix with these two tea-spoonfuls of salt, one of pepper, a quarter of an ounce each of allspice and ginger, powdered, and six ounces of minced onions which have been fried until tender in a little dripping or lard. Add the blood, and mix thoroughly. Half fill the skins, tie them in equal lengths, and boil very gently until they are done enough. In order to ascertain when they have reached the proper point, prick them with a large needle. If nothing but fat follows the needle, take them up, lay them on a napkin to cool, and hang them in a cool dry place. When they are wanted, simmer them for ten minutes, cut them into thin slices, and fry them. Time to boil, about twenty-five minutes. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
This is a genuine fresh blood pudding, and the failure point is not the cooking but the keeping. Read it as a document of a household that killed its own pig, not as a working procedure.
- Why it fails: unrefrigerated storageThe puddings are gently boiled, cooled on a napkin, and then hung in a "cool dry place" for an unspecified period. A cooked, low-acid, high-moisture sausage of blood, fat and onion with no nitrite cure and no drying step is a textbook growth medium for Clostridium botulinum, Listeria and staphylococcal toxin. In a Victorian larder in midwinter this was a calculated risk; in a modern house it is simply spoilage waiting to happen.
- Why it fails: no measured cureTwo teaspoons of salt across a quart of blood plus four ounces of fat is a seasoning level, roughly one percent, not a preserving level. Nothing here is measured against weight, water activity or temperature, so the recipe gives no basis for judging safety. Commercial black pudding is chilled or frozen from the moment it leaves the pot for exactly this reason.
- Why it fails: the doneness testPricking with a needle and looking for clear fat tells you the interior has set, not that it has reached a safe internal temperature. Twenty-five minutes at a bare simmer for a half-filled large skin is plausible for texture and unverifiable for pasteurisation, and the puddings are then held warm while they cool on cloth.
- Fresh blood is not a retail ingredientFresh blood is not an everyday retail ingredient -- A quart of pig's blood, drawn clean and stirred until cold, presumes a home slaughter within minutes. Blood is highly perishable, with a very short window before it clots and before bacterial counts climb. It can occasionally be bought fresh from a butcher who handles it, or as dried powder, but neither reproduces the conditions this recipe assumes.
- What the vinegar is doingThe tablespoon of vinegar into warm blood is an anticoagulant, not a preservative or a flavouring. Stirring until cold keeps the blood liquid and pourable so it will mix with the diced fat rather than setting into lumps. It contributes nothing to keeping quality.
- Reading the quantitiesA quart here is the imperial quart, 40 fluid ounces or about 1.14 litres. "Inward fat" is leaf or flare fat from around the kidneys, the same fat rendered for leaf lard. "The last recipe but one" refers to skin preparation printed elsewhere in the book and is not reproduced on this page.
- If you want black puddingBuy it made, or work from a current recipe with measured cure, weighed ingredients and stated internal temperatures and chilling times. The seasoning idea here, allspice and ginger with onions softened in dripping, is the interesting part and is not what makes the recipe unsafe.
Blood puddings are among the oldest sausages in Europe, made wherever a pig was killed and nothing could be wasted; the blood was caught in a basin, stirred to keep it from clotting, and turned into pudding the same day. Cassell's places this among a small run of black pudding recipes with shared instructions for cleaning and filling the skins, which tells you the book still expected some readers to be handling a whole carcass rather than buying joints. The onion version is the plainer English style, thickened with nothing but its own fat and set by cooking, unlike the oatmeal or barley puddings of the north and Scotland or the French boudin noir enriched with cream. The habit of slicing cold pudding thin and frying it, which the recipe ends with, is how black pudding is still most often eaten in Britain and Ireland.