Made with porpoise blood, eaten with beaver tail: The not-so-normal history of the black pudding

The history of black pudding began with the Odyssey. Or, at the very least, Homer’s Greek epic — written some time around the 8th century BC — contains the very first reference to the beloved breakfast staple.

That said, Homer’s version sounds a little different to black pudding as we know it today. ‘As when a man, besides a great fire, has filled a sausage with fat and blood and turns it this way and that and is very eager to get it quickly roasted’ runs the line — and there is no mention of the oatmeal present in the modern British variety. Clearly, however, Homer had black pudding on his mind as, some way into the poem, the hero Odysseus finds himself in a fight over something that sounds much like it; namely, ‘a stomach stuffed with pig blood and fat’.

The original concept of black pudding is a fairly obvious one. Meat was once fiercely expensive to raise and it would have been absolutely verboten to waste any of an animal at all — the brain was used to tan hides, for instance; whereas horn would have been used for buttons. The blood, fat and scraps (more or less the original black pudding), roasted in an animal’s intestines, would have been considered a very fine thing indeed.

Although the black pudding we eat in Britain today has a European lineage, spreading initially with the Romans before becoming a favourite among monks, it has long been a global dish. In 2019, on the northern Mongolian steppe, nomadic herders came across two large bronze cauldrons, which were later found to date back more than 2,700 years to the Bronze Age.

Using protein analysis, scientists at the University of Basel were able to identify traces of the blood of sheep and goats inside them. Through working with Mongolian archeologists — and by looking at cave paintings that depict ancient Mongolian cooking — it was determined that these vessels had been used to make black pudding.

Over time, regional variations developed across Europe. In France, for instance, boudin noir is a type of black pudding incorporating onions, apples and cream. It is sweeter than our own version and often eaten with apple sauce. The Spanish, due to the Moorish influence, have morcilla, which is cooked with rice; whereas our very own, very British variety tends to utilise oats and barley, seasoned with marjoram — a native British herb from the oregano family, which grows on chalky ground in late summer.

Yorkshire — supposedly because it was so full of monastic houses, from the Benedictines to the Augustinians to the Cistercians — has long been Britain’s black-pudding heartland, but even in the early medieval period it was fairly common for poor families right across the country to own a pig. Black pudding was thus fairly ubiquitous.

Records show that it was a dish enjoyed by both the poorest and the wealthiest. One extraordinary 15th-century recipe suggests that porpoise blood made the choicest version (for those who could source it) and, in the 16th century, black pudding eaten with beaver tail was said to be a breakfast favourite of Henry VIII.

By the 17th century, Britain had seemingly had too much of a good thing and black pudding fell calamitously out of favour. The trouble was that Puritan scholars, particularly Methodists, claimed that God had clearly forbidden Noah to consume meat still containing blood, establishing the idea that blood is life. They assumed that one clearly shouldn’t be eating black pudding.

In 1652, things had become so fraught that the future Bishop of Lincoln, Thomas Barlow, wrote a treatise against the dish, titled The Trial of a Black-Pudding. What’s more, Sir Isaac Newton, born 10 years before Barlow’s screed, was bizarrely opposed to black pudding and wouldn’t eat it for breakfast — those who denounced it used Newton as a sort of poster boy for the anti-black pudding movement.

Happily for us, religious fervour waned and the enthusiasm of the everyman for the dish endured. Recipes for black pudding appear in some of the earliest recipe books. For instance, The Accomplisht Cook, published by Robert May in 1660, includes a recipe for black pudding that uses an extensive range of herbs, including strawberry leaves and thyme. Interestingly, it is fairly unspecific in the type of blood required, calling generally for ‘eight pints of warm goose blood, sheep’s blood, calves, or lambs, or fawns blood’.

There has long been an association with eating black pudding around Martinmas, which falls every year on November 11 — the date when livestock traditionally tended to be slaughtered for the winter. However, as people stopped keeping pigs at home in quite the same hand-to-mouth way and pork was trickier to lay one’s hands on, towns with big pork markets in areas such as Lancashire, in the north of England, and Co Cork, in Ireland, began to be known for their black pudding (English black pudding tends to be made with pig’s blood, which has a sweetness to it, whereas using sheep’s or ox blood is common in Scotland and Ireland). Today, the very same black puddings are seen as both common fare and a luxury product. With its high iron and protein content, it is even seen to have some health benefits.

Kenneth MacLeod is a third-generation black-pudding maker in Stornoway, which since 2013 has had protected EU status as a pudding-making region. Speaking from his butcher’s shop, where his two sons now also work, he explains that 20% of MacLeod & MacLeod’s ox-blood black puddings are eaten by those on the Isle of Lewis. The rest are put on a ferry to be sent across the country (they’re served at fine Edinburgh restaurants, such as Café Andaluz) and further afield (as far as Dubai). Most people, Kenneth explains, don’t really want their black pudding to change, so it remains much as his father and grandfather would have known it — which is to say, deliciously peppery.

There are two other well-established black-pudding makers in Stornoway, but Kenneth won’t be drawn when asked if the 2,000 puddings he makes a week are the best in town. ‘You can’t ask a black-pudding maker questions like that,’ he says. Kenneth thinks the great thing about black pudding is that it goes with most things and even enhances dishes — cooking it with scallops, he explains, is a Hebridean favourite.

In Bury, Lancashire, they take a slightly different approach. Black pudding there is often simmered, then split down the middle and eaten with mustard. The Bury Black Pudding Company is one of the biggest and most renowned pudding makers in Britain and ships its wares to Spain, Portugal, the Canary Islands, Hong Kong and even Abu Dhabi.

One of the great changes in the industry, explains brand and marketing manager Matthew McDermid, were regulations introduced in 1998 that meant it became much harder to use fresh blood. The Bury Black Pudding Company, like many large producers, now uses dried blood instead. Although this might not sound quite so appealing, it does allow for complete consistency of flavour (not least as the quality of fresh blood used to vary).

In a moment of marketing genius, in 2003, the company’s managing director, Debbie Pierce, took a banner reading ‘Bury Black Pudding’ to the tennis at Wimbledon and sat in the front row on centre court. The stunt gave her puddings the most tremendous television coverage and she points to that afternoon as making the family business’s name — quite a moment for someone who started selling black pudding at Bury market as a 12 year old. As for Bury’s recipe… she won’t impart much about it, but part of what makes a Bury black pudding distinctive is the mixing of its ingredients to a gravy-like consistency before cooking, which provides its famous creaminess.

On a bright, early autumn day, I walked across London to Pimlico’s famous Regency Café, a greasy spoon that seems to have been flat-out busy since it opened in 1946. The queue was almost out the door and, when I got to the front, I could have ordered almost anything: scampi, an all-day breakfast, bolognese, liver and chips… it goes on. Yet there was only one thing I was after. Outside in the sun, I sat and ate four slices of black pudding, ancient, but still popular, both very global and very local, much loved and at one point fiercely disdained. Food is never merely food. Bound up within the beloved black pudding there’s so much culture, so much history — and so many stories.