Important: Safety Warning
This page describes preparations historically taken to end pregnancy or "bring on the menses." These substances do not work as claimed and are seriously toxic; their use has caused poisoning and death.
This page prescribes plants as medicine according to pre-modern medical theory. Several of the plants named are toxic, correct identification is difficult, and the doses given have no scientific basis. Do not ingest or apply any preparation described here.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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To Make Black Puddings
350. 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 mean time 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 pennyroyal, 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 pennyroyal, some savoury and thyme; then add salt, pepper, and allspice, finely powdered. Mix the above with a quart of the blood, prepare 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.
This is a full traditional blood sausage of the type made at pig-killing time, and two of its central elements put it outside what can be recommended now: the herb it is seasoned with, and the way the finished puddings are kept. The notes below explain the terms and the hazards; use a current blood-pudding recipe if you want to make one.
- Pennyroyal is the reason to stopBoth versions call for "a good quantity" of pennyroyal (Mentha pulegium). Its essential oil is largely pulegone, which is metabolised to a liver toxin; poisonings and deaths are documented, and the plant was long used as an abortifacient. No safe culinary dose is established, and "a good quantity" in a pudding eaten by the slice is well outside anything defensible.
- Raw blood by the quartA quart of fresh pig's blood, stirred with salt and stood overnight, is the base. Blood is an excellent growth medium, and where it is sold at all it should come from a licensed abattoir, chilled, with a very short shelf life. Blood of unknown handling should not be used at any stage.
- Hanging the puddings in the kitchenThe instruction to cool the boiled links between cloths and then hang them up in the kitchen is ambient storage of a cooked, moist, low-acid, high-protein food. That is a setting in which Clostridium perfringens and, in a tied gut casing, other anaerobes can grow. Nothing in the recipe acidifies, dries or cures the puddings.
- GritsHere "whole grits" means hulled whole oat or barley groats, not the American maize product of the same name. They swell greatly, which is why the pudding is thickened with a soak rather than a roux.
- A quartern loafA quartern loaf was baked from a quarter of a peck of flour and weighed roughly four pounds, so the crumb of one is a very large amount of bread -- perhaps 2 to 2 1/2 lb once the crust is off. Read alongside three pounds of beef suet, this gives the scale: a pig-killing batch rather than a small one.
- Leaf and flare fat'The leaf' is the sheet of hard fat lining the pig's abdominal cavity, sold today as leaf lard fat. It is firmer than back fat and holds its shape when diced, which is why fat of this kind suits the first receipt's method of putting it in 'large bits' at intervals rather than mixing it through.
- Why only half filled, and why prickedGrits and bread both absorb liquid and expand during boiling. A casing filled more than halfway will split, hence the loose links and the pricking as they swell. That part of the method is sound and applies to any grain-bound sausage.
- The basin variantThe fallback of boiling the mixture in basins covered with floured cloths, then slicing and frying it, parallels the block black pudding sold in a loaf rather than a link. It carries the same objections as the sausage version.
Black pudding belongs to the pig-killing calendar rather than to the cookbook proper: blood spoils quickly, so it had to be cooked into something soon after the animal was killed. What dates this particular receipt is the pennyroyal, which appears in a number of British blood-pudding receipts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the herb was cheap and grew wild on damp ground, and its sharp minty note was taken to answer the richness of blood and suet. The same plant had a long parallel life in folk medicine, which is where its modern reputation as a poison comes from; modern commercial black puddings are seasoned without it.