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Pork Black Puddings
When black puddings or blood puddings are liked at all they are generally liked very much. They are boiled in the intestines of the hog, and these must of course be very carefully prepared for them as follows. Empty them, wash and scrape them in several waters, turning them inside out two or three times, and lay them in salt and water all night. The next day rinse them in fresh cold water, and they will be ready for use. To make the puddings, throw a little salt into a quart of the warm blood, and stir until it 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 which has been soaked in two quarts of hot milk until the liquid was absorbed. Mix these ingredients thoroughly. Prepare a seasoning of a tea-spoonful of winter savoury mixed with a tea-spoonful of chopped thyme, a tea-spoonful of chopped onion, half a tea-spoonful of pennyroyal, two tea-spoonfuls of salt, one of pepper, half a dozen pounded cloves, half a nutmeg, grated, and a quarter of an ounce each of pounded allspice and ginger. Stir this seasoning into the groats, bread-crumbs, and blood, and add three pounds of finely-chopped beef suet and six well-beaten eggs. Cut half a pound of the inward fat of the pig into pieces the size of a large bean. Tie the skins 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, throw them into boiling water, and when they have boiled for five minutes take them out, prick them to let out the air, put them back, and boil gently for half an hour. Take them up, and when they are cold hang them in a cool dry place until wanted. When they are to be used, boil a few minutes in water, and toast in a Dutch oven. Probable cost, 4s. 6d. Sufficient for twelve persons.
This is a full farmhouse blood pudding from pig-killing day, and two things in it put it outside modern practice: the pennyroyal in the seasoning and the quart of fresh, unrefrigerated blood it is built on. The notes below explain the terms and why the recipe should be read rather than followed.
- Pennyroyal is the reason to stopMentha pulegium was a standard English pudding herb, which is exactly why it appears here, but its active compound pulegone is hepatotoxic and it is no longer regarded as a food plant; it is restricted or banned as a flavouring in several jurisdictions. Half a teaspoon spread through twelve portions is not a large dose, but there is no established safe culinary quantity, and the herb has no substitute role here worth the risk.
- The bloodA quart of blood caught warm at slaughter and stirred until cold at room temperature is a good medium for Salmonella and other enterics, and it is being handled for hours before it ever meets heat. Blood intended for food today is expected to come from an inspected slaughterhouse, be chilled immediately and kept cold, and in some places it is not readily obtainable by the public. The finished puddings are boiled, but the pre-cooking handling window is the problem.
- CasingsThe overnight salt-and-water soak of hand-scraped hog intestines is the traditional method and it is a cleaning step, not a preserving or pathogen-killing one. Commercially prepared, salted natural casings exist precisely because this stage is difficult to do safely in a domestic kitchen.
- Storage after cookingHalf an hour at a gentle boil cooks a half-filled casing through, but nothing in this recipe cures or preserves it. Hanging a cooked, moist, blood-and-suet pudding "in a cool dry place until wanted" was viable only in an unheated larder in winter, and even then on the assumption of quick use. A modern reader should use a current recipe from a source that gives cooking and chilling temperatures.
- Quartern loafA quartern loaf weighed roughly 4 lb, made from about 3½ lb of flour (explained variously as a quarter of a peck or a quarter of a stone). "The grated crumb" of one means the whole interior of a large loaf, crusts discarded, which is why it will take two quarts of hot milk.
- Whole groatsGroats are hulled whole oat grains, not rolled oats and not oatmeal. Soaked overnight they stay distinct and slightly chewy in the finished pudding, the texture that Lancashire and Yorkshire black puddings still have.
- Dutch ovenIn Victorian usage a Dutch oven is the open-fronted tin reflector stood before the fire to brown or toast food, not the lidded cast-iron pot the name now means. "Toast in a Dutch oven" is what would now be done under a grill or in a dry pan.
- Scale and costA quart of blood, a quart of groats, three pounds of suet, six eggs, two quarts of milk and a 4 lb loaf is a very large batch by household standards; the book gives the probable cost as 4s. 6d. and calls it sufficient for twelve persons.
Blood puddings are among the oldest recorded sausages in Europe, and in Britain they belong to the winter pig-killing, when blood, suet, offal and intestines all had to be used within a day or two and nothing could be wasted. The seasoning in this version is the giveaway of its age: winter savory, thyme, and above all pennyroyal, a mint that was known in English as pudding grass, a name often said to derive from the herb's use in puddings of this kind, along with the warm spices — cloves, nutmeg, allspice, ginger — that had been standard in English blood puddings since the medieval period. Groats rather than oatmeal, and a bread-and-milk panade for bulk, point to the northern English tradition that survives in the Bury black pudding. Cassell's, compiled for late-Victorian middle-class households, prints the recipe with a note that these puddings are either disliked or loved with enthusiasm, which suggests its readers were as divided about them then as now.