TRADITIONAL BLACK PUDDING
4th January 2014 Research 112
BLACK PUDDING IS A BLOOD SAUSAGE
The black pudding has a rich and interesting history all of its own, stretching back over thousands of years and many countries, but in Great Britian, the black pudding is a essential ingredient of the full English breakfast.
Black pudding is a kind of sausage, except that unlike normal sausages, you make it with blood. To make a black pudding, you must cook blood mixed with a filler (oatmeal) until it is thick enough to congeal when cooled.
The very first time that the black pudding appeared in literature was in 800 BC, when black pudding was mentioned in Homer's classic saga 'The Odyssey'. Homer famously described the way people felt then about black puddings and wrote :
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.
Later on in the Odyssey, Homer had his champiom Odysseus get into a fight “around the sausage” for a prize of a stomach stuffed with pig blood and fat. Clearly Homer was a man who liked his black pudding.
Black pudding was not just food for the poor, it was also food fit for the nobility and the extravagant breakfast banquets held by King Henry VIII at Hampton Court always included black pudding on the table.
Black Pudding Is Controversial in Religious Circles
In the 17th century, the consumption of black pudding was a fairly controversial subject and a theological debate fiercely raged round it, with many Christian scholars (particularly Methodists) believing that nobody should eat it at all.
Right in the middle of these arguments about the black pudding (which dominated much of the late 16th and early 17th centuries), was the famous Sir Isaac Newton who was famously vocal in his dislike of black pudding and refusal to eat it at breakfast time.
Those against the eating of blood products claimed that the Apostles ruled that Christians must not eat blood and claimed Newton’s abstinence from black pudding as non-religious support of their beliefs.