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Yorkshire Black Puddings
Crumble a quarter of a pound of stale bread, pour boiling milk over it to cover it, and let it remain until it has absorbed the milk. Soak a pint of coarse oatmeal, and boil it for half an hour in as much milk as will entirely cover it. Mix it with the soaked stale bread, and add a pint of blood and half a pint of good cream, together with half a pound of finely-shredded suet, two table-spoonfuls of chopped parsley, a dessert-spoonful of chopped thyme, and the same quantity of marjoram, sage, and pennyroyal, a leek, a small onion, a dessert-spoonful of salt, a tea-spoonful of black pepper, six powdered cloves, and a pinch of grated nutmeg, ground ginger, and powdered allspice. Mix the ingredients thoroughly, and add four well-beaten eggs. Have ready one pound of the inner fat of the pig cut into dice. Cleanse the skins thoroughly. Half fill them, and put in the fat amongst the mince. Tie the skins in links, prick them with a fork, and boil till done enough. Let them cool, and hang them in a cool situation till wanted. Broil them lightly over a clear fire, and serve on a napkin. Time to boil the puddings, about an hour.
An oatmeal-and-blood pudding of the northern English type, closer to a modern Bury black pudding than to anything in a French charcuterie book. Two things in it put the recipe out of reach: the pennyroyal, and the fresh blood.
- Pennyroyal is the reason to stopMentha pulegium contains pulegone, which is hepatotoxic and the herb was long used as an abortifacient; it is not used as a food flavouring today, and serious poisonings are documented from the essential oil and from strong medicinal infusions. A dessert-spoonful of chopped leaf per batch is not a trace amount, and the herb should not be eaten in pregnancy. Use a current black pudding recipe instead.
- The bloodA pint of pig's blood must be caught clean at slaughter, kept cold, stirred or defibrinated so it does not clot, and used within a day or two. Blood is an excellent growth medium; unlike the finished pudding, which does get an hour's boiling, the raw mixing and filling stage carries the whole risk, and the book gives no temperature or timing for holding it.
- "Hang them in a cool situation"This assumes a cold larder in an unheated house and a household that would eat them within days. A cooked, uncured blood pudding held at cellar temperature is outside any modern storage guidance.
- Skins"Cleanse the skins thoroughly" points to wide casings, most likely hog casings (beef runners were also used for puddings of this size), scraped and flushed. Salted casings from a butcher are the modern equivalent and need long soaking and rinsing, not scraping.
- Units, for reading the recipeA pint is 20 fl oz in this book, so a pint of blood is about 2½ US cups, and a pint of coarse oatmeal is a volume measure, somewhere around 12–14 oz of pinhead or steel-cut oats. A dessert-spoonful is about two teaspoons.
- "Inner fat of the pig"Flare or leaf fat, the soft kidney fat, cut in dice so it stays visible as white flecks rather than melting into the mass. The half pound of shredded suet is a second, harder fat worked through the batter.
- ScaleBetween the oatmeal, bread, blood, cream and a pound and a half of fat, this makes several pounds of pudding, filling a good few feet of casing. It was written for a household that had just killed a pig and had to use everything at once.
Blood puddings are among the oldest recorded sausages in Europe, and the oatmeal-thickened version belongs firmly to the north of England, where oats did what breadcrumbs or rice did elsewhere; Yorkshire and Lancashire both claimed a style, and Bury's remains the best known. The pennyroyal here is a mark of the recipe's age: the herb's old English name was pudding grass, a name traditionally explained by just this use in blood puddings and stuffings. Pig-killing was a fixed point in the domestic year — the blood, flare fat and gut all had to be dealt with within a day, and a pudding like this was the mechanism for doing it. The finishing instruction, broiled over a clear fire and served on a napkin, is how such a pudding reached a Victorian breakfast table.