Home › Cookery › Liver Pudding
Liver Pudding
Take two hog's heads, clean nicely; two livers, two lights, and cut all the good part off half a dozen milts; half a dozen sweetbreads; half a dozen kidneys, split open.
Put all together in a tub of salt and water; let them soak all night; take them out next morning, put them in a kettle with two slices of fat pork. Let all boil until done, then take it up and let it cool a little and grind it in a sausage mill, and while grinding, skim some of the grease off of the kettle and pour it into the mill. After it is ground, season with black pepper, salt, and onions chopped fine, to suit the taste.
If it is not rich enough, boil more middling or pork and mix with the meat; if stuffed, boil again a few minutes.
This is hog-killing work written for a farm kitchen, scaled to a whole day's butchering rather than a family supper. Almost everything in it can still be done, but the shopping list has changed more than the method has.
- ScaleTwo hog's heads, two livers, two sets of lungs, six spleens, six sweetbreads and six kidneys will yield a very large quantity of pudding, plausibly 25 to 35 pounds. A single half-head with a piece of liver and a kidney or two makes a manageable batch of a few pounds.
- Lights"Lights" are lungs. They cannot legally be sold for food in the United States and have not been since the 1971 federal inspection rules; they are still sold in parts of the UK and elsewhere. Leave them out and increase the head meat and liver to compensate.
- Milts and sweetbreadsA milt is the spleen, a dark flat organ with a strong iron taste — "the good part" means trimming away the tough capsule and vessels. Sweetbreads here are pork thymus and pancreas, sometimes available frozen from whole-animal butchers if ordered ahead.
- Hog's headAsk the butcher to split it and remove the eyes, ears, snout and brain. The jowl, cheek and tongue are the meat you are after, along with the gelatin the bones give up. A split half-head, commonly somewhere around 5 to 8 lb, is a usual unit sold now.
- The overnight soakThe tub of salt and water is a purge, not a cure — it draws blood out of the offal and firms it. Cold-refrigerate it rather than leaving it on a porch, and rinse well before it goes in the kettle. Kidneys especially need splitting and soaking or they taste of ammonia.
- Boil until doneAbout 2 1/2 to 3 hours at a bare simmer for the head; liver, spleen and sweetbreads need far less and are better lifted out after 30 to 45 minutes, or they turn granular. Keep the cooking liquor.
- Grinding warmThis is the hinge. The meat must be ground while still hot and the skimmed fat added as it goes through, or the mixture will not bind and the pudding will crumble when sliced. Use a coarse plate, and moisten with hot broth if it stiffens.
- Stuffing and second boil"If stuffed" means into hog casings; a few minutes at a simmer sets the casing and seals it. Unstuffed, press the mixture into loaf pans and chill until firm, then slice and fry — much as liver pudding and its cornmeal-extended relative liver mush are eaten today.
- KeepingThere is no cure or preservative here, only salt to taste. Treat it as fresh cooked sausage: refrigerate and eat within three or four days, or freeze. The original relied on cold winter weather and a household that ate it quickly.
Liver pudding belongs to the day after the hog was killed, when the organs and head — the parts that would not keep and could not be cured — had to be cooked and eaten within a week or two. Marion Cabell Tyree's Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) collected contributions from some 250 ladies of Virginia and her sister states, and recipes at this scale show that its readers were still provisioning farms rather than shopping. The same mixture, under different names and with cornmeal added to stretch it, survives across the mid-Atlantic and upper South: livermush, chiefly in western North Carolina, and liver pudding, chiefly in the eastern Carolinas, though the usage is less tidy than that division suggests, and as a close relative of Pennsylvania scrapple; the Pennsylvania German ponhaws and the British faggot and haslet come from the identical logic of not wasting the pluck. The word "pudding" here carries its older, wider sense of anything boiled in a skin or a bag, which is also how black pudding and hog's pudding got their names.