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Sect. 2.-Black Puddings, and White Puddings To Make Black Puddings
487. The blood must be stirred with salt till cold. Put a quart of it, or rather more, to a quart of whole grits, to soak one night; and soak the crumb of a quartern loaf in rather more than two quarts of new milk made hot. In the meantime prepare the entrails by washing, turning, and scraping with salt and water, and changing the water several times. Chop fine a little winter-savoury and thyme, a good quantity of penny-royal, pepper, and salt, a few cloves, some allspice, ginger, and nutmeg; mix these with three pounds of beef-suet and six eggs well beaten and strained; and then beat the bread, grits, &c., all up with the seasoning; when well mixed, have ready some hog's fat cut into large bits, and as you fill the skins put it in at proper distances. Tie in links, only half filled, and boil in a large kettle, pricking them as they swell, or they will burst. When boiled, lay them between clean cloths till cold, and hang them up in the kitchen. When to be used, scald them a few minutes in water; wipe, and put them into a Dutch oven. If there are not skins enough, put the stuffing into basins, and boil it covered with floured cloths; and slice and fry it when to be used.
Another Receipt.-Soak all night a quart of bruised grits in as much boiling hot milk as will swell them and leave half a pint of liquid. Chop a good quantity of penny-royal, some savoury and thyme; then add salt, pepper, and allspice, finely powdered. Mix the above with a quart of the blood, prepared as before directed; then half fill the skins, after they have been cleaned thoroughly, and put as much of the leaf (that is, the inward fat) of the pig as will make it pretty rich. Boil as before directed. A small quantity of leeks finely shred and well mixed is a great improvement.
This is a farmhouse pig-killing receipt from the era when blood, gut and leaf fat all had to be used within a day of slaughter. Several of its instructions and one of its herbs put it outside what can be made safely now.
- Pennyroyal is the blocking problemMentha pulegium and its American counterpart are rich in pulegone, which is hepatotoxic and was once used as an abortifacient; poisoning and deaths are documented from the essential oil, and the leaf in quantity is not considered food-safe. The receipt calls for "a good quantity" twice, making it the dominant seasoning rather than a trace. There is no safe amount to substitute in at this scale.
- Raw blood, unstabilisedThe blood here is caught at slaughter and stirred with salt only until cold to stop it clotting, then left to soak grain overnight with no further chilling specified. Blood is an ideal growth medium, and nothing in the method keeps it cold through the long soak or brings it to a controlled temperature beforehand. Food-grade blood today is chilled hard, and in some places is not sold to the public at all.
- Home-cleaned entrailsCasings washed, turned and scraped in salt water at home carry the gut contents' bacterial load with them. Commercial casings are cleaned, salted and inspected under supervision; the two are not equivalent.
- Hanging a cooked pudding in the kitchenAfter boiling, the puddings are laid between cloths until cold and then hung up in the kitchen, with no stated limit on how long. A boiled blood-and-suet pudding is a low-acid, high-protein, moist product with no cure in it; ambient storage of blood puddings is the condition behind recorded nineteenth-century cases of sausage poisoning.
- No quantities that could be checkedThere is no salt percentage, no core temperature, no boiling time beyond "boil as before directed," and no chilling step. Nothing in the text can be verified against a modern standard, which is why it cannot simply be scaled or timed differently.
- Terms, for reading the text"Grits" here means hulled oat or barley groats, not the fine hominy grits of the American South; a quartern loaf is the old four-pound loaf; "leaf" is the sheet of firm fat around the kidneys. "New milk" is fresh whole milk, unskimmed.
- If you want black puddingBuy it from a butcher, or follow a current recipe written with food-grade blood, measured cure and a stated core temperature. Do not adapt this one.
Black pudding belongs to the pig-killing calendar rather than to the kitchen year: blood does not keep long, so it was generally used the same day the animal was bled, and the oatmeal or barley groats that bulk it out were whatever grain the house already had in the bin. That is why receipts of this kind appear in nineteenth-century British collections in bewildering variety — ratios of grain to blood, and the choice of herb, varied from place to place. Pennyroyal was a common English seasoning in such puddings, and it drops out of later recipes. The second receipt's leeks may reflect northern practice, and the note about putting the stuffing into basins when the skins run out is a reminder that these mixtures were also eaten simply as a boiled and fried pudding, without casings at all.