It's time we had a serious talk about black pudding.
Not everybody likes the stuff, but I think it’s a proper treat.
You don’t always see it in my local Co-op but I chanced on a 230g (8oz in old money) pack the other day and I couldn’t resist it.
Four round slices from the Bury Black Pudding Company, promised to be of the finest quality, a great source of iron and less than 3% fat.
That last bit is quite important. I know what goes into this traditional Lancashire dish, and I’m not squeamish about that. but I don’t like the gobbets of hard fat in some versions.
This one didn’t disappoint. Fried in the pan for six or seven minutes, and turned regularly so it had a thin hard skin, it was delicious.
Eaten with fresh bread and butter, it’s a meal in itself, but Mrs R prefers to have beans with it. Fair enough. She likes stuff I don’t. In the matter of food, as in many others, we are Mr and Mrs Sprat.
I looked up the origins of black pudding. It’s a sausage made from beef or pork blood, with fat and cereal such as oats or barley, plus herbs, like penny royal, known here as pudding-yerb.
First recorded in 1450, it probably gets it’s name from the French word boudin, meaning small sausage. Variations abound, including ice cream and the Manchester Egg.
That’s enough history. I hear that the World Black Pudding Throwing Competition, in which contestants throw black puddings at piles of Yorkshire puddings, takes place annually in Ramsbottom, Lancs.
Whatever turns them on over there, but it sounds like a waste of perfectly good food to me.
