Have you heard the one about Michael Collins and Clonakilty Black Pudding? What about the ox blood mixed with mortar used to build the walls of Ireland’s castles? And did you ever eat a goose neck pudding, or enjoy a slice of Achill Belly, made with sheep’s blood and suet?
These are just three pieces of the extraordinary esoterica which Kate Ryan unearths in her debut book, Blood, Guts & Black Pudding. The book is by turns startling and learned, a dogged, rigorous, forensic exploration of Ireland’s relationship with its blood puddings and, thereby, its ancient relationship with animal blood.
Ms Ryan has left no stone unturned in her search for what black puddings mean to our food culture. She begins her second chapter like this:
“By bleeding a well nourished European cow 4 litres every second week over a period of two and a half years it is possible to obtain an amount of protein roughly equal to the amount obtained by slaughtering the cow.”
This is a startling fact, but no less startling is the fact that Ryan’s source here is an obscure article entitled “Blood is Food” by Birgit Siesby, written back in 1980 for the fourth edition of an obscure and scholarly London gastronomical periodical entitled Petits Propos Culinaires, edited by the late Alan Davidson, author of The Oxford Companion to Food.
Chances are that Siesby’s fine piece was read by 17 people, but Ryan’s book shows that nothing is too obscure, too hidden, too arcane, to escape her dogged research: she is the gum shoe food detective, the Philip Marlowe of black pudding.
Of course there is a great deal about black pudding in the book, from the moment in 1989 when Clonakilty Black Pudding went from being a feature of your Sunday fry-up to a national culinary icon, to what James Joyce thought of Cork’s iconic drisheen. But Ryan frames all this in the context of our historical and present culture: her black pudding is a prism that helps us understand the society we live in.
Behind it all is Ryan’s simple, fundamental question: “What do we lose when the blood is gone?” Blood and blood puddings have been an aspect of our history for centuries, predating the potato, the loaf of soda bread, and the pint of stout, yet we are both careless and uncurious about them. Kate Ryan’s formidable and important book does a mighty job of demanding respect for this simple food, as she painstakingly shows that we are all bound by blood.
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