A Bloody Good Dinner

A couple of weeks ago, I celebrated St. Patrick's Day with a small dinner party consisting of myself, a boy that I like, and 5 really cool friends -- or 7, if you count the babies!  The fare was authentic Irish food (and Irish-American dishes) including shepherd's pie with poundies, corned beef and cabbage, barley with peas and herbs, potato candy, and 2 savory puddings, black and white.  I also made potato candy and a chocolate-orange trifle (recipes to follow in another entry).

I'll give you my white pudding recipe next time, but in this entry I want to explain my process for making black pudding.  For those of you who have never tried it, you should DEFINITELY give it a shot.  And if you've eaten it but never made your own, I'd recommend trying that too; it's a really visceral experience.  (Ha, ha.)

While blood is actually considered tissue in the body, as well as offal in butchering terms, I'm still categorizing this entry under "organs" since it's often sold and processed with the organ meat anyway.

For years and years, I've wanted to make black pudding.  But it can be tough to find a good blood provider.  I have seen pork blood for sale at the local Asian grocery, but I've always been reluctant to purchase it -- their meat always looked kind of old and sad, unlike their very fresh fish department.  However, a few years ago, I was given the phone number of Blood Farm, which is local and has a slaughterhouse on premises.  (It is a farm which is owned and operated by the Blood family -- by coincidence, it's also a place where one can buy blood and guts!)  Unfortunately, we missed pig slaughtering day, so no dice for pork blood.  However, they were slaughtering cows the day before we called, so I had my man order a quart of beef blood, with a bit of salt in it to keep it from congealing.

The next day, he came back from Blood Farm with a large plastic bag, which was tied with a thin rope and filled with an indeterminate amount of cow blood.  It was still warm!  What a grisly sight indeed... I almost couldn't process the blood.  (I did say ALMOST!)  I cut the rope, and ever-so-carefully poured the blood into a plastic container.  Turns out that for six dollars, I received nearly three-quarters of a gallon of delicious beef blood.  Mmm mmm, good!

After perusing a number of recipes online, I pretty much made up my own recipe, using this black pudding recipe from Phebotomist as a reference for cook times and blood-to-filler proportions.

I mixed my blood together with milk, bread, barley, a bit of flour, some butter (instead of suet), and lots of yummy chopped garlic with other seasonings.  Then I stirred everything together in order to mix it as thoroughly as possible.  All of the black pudding recipes that I found online called for oats, oat flour, or "fine oatmeal", but I had used up all of my oats on the white pudding.  So, I decided to improvise and use a few cups of Cheerios as a substitute. Breakfast of champions, my friends!

Then, the pot of bloody Cheerios was whisked away by my man, who put the whole thing onto the stove as he stirred it over a medium flame.  It was supposed to darken, but after a few minutes of the two of us looking back and forth at each other, going "WTF?" over a blood-red Cheerio stew, the mixture began to bubble and foam up a bit.  Then out of nowhere, up came a huge black bubble!  After some vigorous stirring, the rest of the mixture followed suit.  He then poured the mixture into one of our large casserole dishes -- I couldn't believe how much this recipe yielded, by the way -- and amazingly enough, many of the Cheerios remained intact!  In fact, the whole mixture looked quite a lot like brownies with a passel of Cheerios gaily festooning it here and there. 

The next step was to let the mixture sit in the fridge for awhile, and then to cut it into slices and fry it.  I thought that the blood pudding tasted fantastic, sweet and meaty and buttery.  In fact, it reminded me quite a bit of "the orange stuff in stuffed derma" (sorry, can't remember what it's called).  But it was far too greasy for me to enjoy it quite as much as I wish I had.  I don't think that suet would have melted as quickly as butter had, during the cooking stage.  However, next time I make this (and that day won't be toooo far off!), I think I'll just omit the butter/suet component during the first act.  It was also very soft, which I didn't really mind, but stuffing it in casing will make for a much yummier eating experience next time.  But all in all, I'd call this attempt a success!

I already have another small batch of ideas for cooking with blood in the future, so watch this space for the dirty details. :)