@dduane called upstairs and told me: "Neil's got one for you!"
Well, maybe not me specifically, but here goes... :->
Black pudding is the Irish / UK name for a sausage made with blood - pig, cow or sheep - rather than chopped or minced meat as the main ingredient, forms of which are found in cuisines all over the world.
Black pudding can be long or short, straight or curved ("stick" or "ring"), and sometimes even a cake or terrine.
The "pudding" part, which USAians associate with a sweet dessert, comes from the French word "boudin" (boudin noir is French blood sausage) and seems to have something to do with "edible material inside a wrapper" - the wrapper may also be edible, like the skin on a sausage or black pudding...
...and the suet crust of a steak-and-kidney pudding...
...or inedible like the cloth or bag used for a boiled pudding. This is how Christmas puddings used to be made, hence Dickens writing that the Cratchit house smelled like a laundry, and why traditional images show them as spherical with a sprig of holly on top.
Black puddings are also boiled before going on sale, so they're actually cooked and ready-to-eat, though I've never heard of anyone hereabouts doing so.
Usually they become an ingredient in a recipe such as this salad (one of DD's Middle Kingdoms dishes)...
... or appear sliced as part of a fry-up.
The black puddings I'm most familiar with (Irish / UK) mostly use pig-blood, oats or barley and various herbs and spices. They're a standard part of a Full Irish Breakfast / Ulster Fry - just the sort of thing to start a day that involves ploughing a 40-acre field behind two Shire horses, though perhaps best eaten infrequently if just sitting at a desk.
This is pretty close to the sort of Ulster Fry I grew up with, including the black pudding...
...though there should also be a slice of white pudding (minced pork, oats or barley, spices) and that ordinary fried bread, nice though it looks, would be a half farl of soda and a couple of farls of potato bread instead.
(For those familiar with a Full English Breakfast and wondering "Why no baked beans?", AFAIK there should never be beans with an Ulster Fry since, unlike everything else, they can't be fried - which, as the name suggests, is the whole point...)
Black puddings were used as weapons (!) for "the Yorkshire martial art of Ecky Thump" (!!) in an episode of 1970s comedy show "The Goodies"; this is the notorious episode where a TV viewer died of laughter...
There are regional variants of black and white pudding all over these islands: Stornoway black pudding from Scotland, Pwdin Du from Wales, Bury black pudding in the Midlands, Hog's Pudding in the West Country and so on.
Perhaps the best known Irish black pudding variant is "drisheen" from Cork and Limerick; its signature herb is tansy, and oatmeal rather than barley gives a softer texture than regular pudding.
Cork and Limerick were major Viking settlements, so I wonder if there's some association between drisheen with tansy and Scandinavian blood sausages with marjoram and other herbs.
That notion was first prompted by Frans Bengtsson's well-researched novel "The Long Ships"; Michael Meyer's excellent translation is the usual English version.
There, black pudding - or at least blood sausage "with thyme in it" - provokes a tearful emotional response from two hard-bitten Vikings who, after several years as slaves then mercenaries in Andalusian (Muslim) Spain, get their first taste of Real Grub at King Harald Bluetooth's Yule feast.
The book version's a bit long, but you can get the picture (hah!) from a couple of frames of the graphic novel.
Wild boar, bread cakes and fried turnips were carried in, but when the blood-sausage came, Orm and Toke got tears in their eyes.
"That scent is best of all!"
"There's thyme in it..."
"Please, if it's not against Harald's orders, could we have some more? For seven years we've been eating vegetables in the land of the Andalusians. We've missed seven Yules-worth of blood-sausage!"
Back in 1987, I felt the same way about foods from home after only 6 months in Los Angeles - and yes, one of those foods was black pudding...
