Black pudding is a sausage made from pork blood, pork fat and oatmeal or barley, seasoned with pepper and spices, cooked and set into a thick roll. It is sliced into discs, fried until crisp at the edges, and eaten as part of a cooked breakfast.
What it tastes like
Not, contrary to expectation, of blood. The dominant flavours are pepper, allspice and the nuttiness of toasted oatmeal, and the texture is crumbly and slightly grainy rather than smooth. Fried properly it develops a crisp outside and a soft middle, and it is rich and savoury in a way that pairs extremely well with egg yolk and bacon.
People who refuse it on principle almost always change their mind if given a slice without being told what it is, which is a well-known trick among British parents.
Bury
The town of Bury in Lancashire is the acknowledged home of British black pudding, and its market stalls sell it hot, boiled rather than fried, eaten from the hand with a dab of English mustard. Bury black pudding has Protected Geographical Indication status.
Bury also hosts the World Black Pudding Throwing Championships, in which competitors throw black puddings underarm at a plinth of Yorkshire puddings twenty feet up a wall, aiming to dislodge as many as possible. Its origins are attributed, with no evidence whatsoever, to the Wars of the Roses.
The regional cousins
- White pudding — the same idea without the blood: fat, oatmeal and seasoning. Common in Scotland and Ireland, where it is often deep fried in a chip shop.
- Stornoway black pudding — from the Isle of Lewis, protected, and widely regarded as the finest in Britain. Coarser and richer than the Lancashire style.
- Hog’s pudding — a West Country version, more heavily spiced and closer to a conventional sausage.
- Drisheen — the Irish relative, softer and traditionally made with sheep’s blood.
Beyond breakfast
British restaurant cooking has taken it seriously for the past thirty years, and black pudding now appears well outside the fry-up:
- With scallops — the classic pairing, the sweetness of the shellfish against the pepper and iron of the pudding.
- With apple, in a salad or as a stuffing.
- Crumbled into a Scotch egg, which is now almost standard in gastropubs.
- In a bacon roll, which is the Glasgow improvement on the bacon roll.
Cooking it
Slice about a centimetre thick, leave the skin on or peel it depending on the type, and fry in a little fat for two or three minutes a side until the outside crisps. Do not move it around the pan; it is fragile and will fall apart. Grilling works too.
A “superfood” marketing campaign a few years ago claimed it as a rich source of iron and protein, which is technically true and rather undercut by the fat content.