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Blood Puddings

Blood pudding is a sausage made from pig blood, salt, fat, breadcrumbs, eggs, herbs, and spices, boiled in skins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Leek and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 152 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Blood Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Combine the blood with salt in a bowl.

  2. Melt the leaf fat in a pan. Add the bread crumbs to the melted fat.

  3. Stir in the beaten eggs, pennyroyal, sweet leeks, pepper, and nutmeg. Mix everything together.

Fill and cook

  1. Fill the skins with the mixture. Add small pieces of leaf fat as desired.

  2. Boil the filled skins for 1 hour, ensuring they do not boil too fast.

  3. Once cooked, lay them on a coarse cloth, separating each pudding. To prevent sticking, dip the puddings in cold water after removing from the pot.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Leek + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together152 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Leek + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together965 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Bread + leektop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together279 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Blood
Forms the body of the pudding and sets to a firm, sliceable texture when cooked.
Eggs
Bind the filling together and help it set as it cooks.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and add body, giving the filling a softer, less dense texture.
Leaf fat
Adds richness and moisture, melting into the filling for a tender result.

The step that matters

Keep the water below a hard boil. Boiling too fast can split the skins or cause the filling to swell and break, so a gentle simmer keeps the puddings intact and evenly set.

Swap the leek

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, egg, pepper, nutmeg):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Leekthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, egg, pepper, nutmeg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More blood pudding recipes

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