Stornoway Black Pudding: A Protected Taste of Lewis

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

The PGI specification sets out the ingredients and area of production. The history of black pudding in the Hebrides before the twentieth century is less well documented, and claims about its antiquity are general. The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) supplies the European history of blood sausages and the British place within it; it does not discuss Stornoway, and its 2014 text is not used for the PGI facts.

A blood sausage

established Black puddings are made by mixing animal blood with fat, a cereal such as oatmeal or barley, and seasonings, stuffing the mixture into a casing and cooking it. Blood sausages are among the oldest prepared foods, found across Europe. In Scotland they were made in rural households when animals were slaughtered, ensuring nothing went to waste.

established A very old idea. The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) explains the logic. When an animal is killed and bled, a large amount of blood is available that will spoil within hours unless it is cooked. Putting it, with other quick-spoiling offal, into a casing supplied by the animal's own entrails is the obvious answer. The Companion calls the black pudding probably the most ancient of sausages. The earliest literary mention it cites is in Homer's Odyssey, of a stomach filled with blood and fat and roasted over a fire. The oldest detailed recipe, in the Roman collection attributed to Apicius, uses lengths of intestine and a rich filling with no cereal, but chopped hard-boiled egg yolks, pine kernels, onions and leeks; ordinary Roman black puddings, the Companion suggests, probably did contain cereal.

established Medieval puddings. In medieval Europe even quite poor families often kept a pig, killed in the autumn, so black puddings were made everywhere. They always had fat and onion, but not always cereal. The Companion cites a fifteenth-century English recipe, a dish for the nobility, made from the blood and fat of a porpoise with oatmeal, spiced with pepper and ginger, boiled and then lightly grilled. Oatmeal in a British black pudding is therefore at least five centuries old.

established The British type. In Britain, the Companion says, black puddings are now eaten mainly in the Midlands and the north, often flavoured with pennyroyal among other herbs, and the cereal is generally oatmeal. Continental puddings contain little or no cereal and depend on chopped onion to absorb the blood. The French boudin noir is made with pig's blood, fat, onion and cream, and in France a black pudding with cereal, made there as well as in England, is called boudin noir à l'anglaise. At the annual boudin competition at Mortagne-au-Perche in Normandy, British entries have several times won the category for puddings made with cereal.

established Relatives abroad. The Companion surveys the family: Spanish morcilla, the most renowned from Asturias and part of the bean stew fabada; Italian sanguinaccio, bound in a net; German Blutwurst, often smoked; Swedish blood sausage with rye meal and raisins; and the Hungarian and east European kishka, which uses ground rice. All blood puddings are cooked as soon as they are made, keep for a few weeks, and are reheated by boiling, slicing and frying, or grilling. The taste of blood itself is mild, like that of liver, so each pudding's character comes from its fat, cereal and seasoning.

Black, white and the mart

established The folklorist F. Marian McNeill, in The Scots Kitchen (1929; second edition 1963), lists haggis and black and white puddings as the dishes of Martinmas (11 November), the "killing of the mart", when a beef animal was slaughtered and salted for the winter. She quotes the old ballad "The Barrin' o' the Door", which opens at Martinmas with the goodwife boiling her puddings in the pan.

established McNeill gives two regional black pudding recipes. Her east-of-Scotland version uses pig's or ox blood, salted and sieved, mixed with milk, shredded suet or pig fat, a handful of oatmeal and plenty of onion. Her west-of-Scotland version uses bullock's or sheep's blood with oatmeal, suet, black and white pepper, skim milk and a spoonful of powdered mint. Both were tied in cleaned tripe skins, boiled and pricked to let out the air, hung up to keep, and reheated and toasted or grilled when wanted. She also records a lamb's blood pudding with cream and chives from Mrs McIver (1773), and quotes Hannah Glasse's note that "in Scotland they make a pudding with the blood of a goose", a dish McNeill says was still made in rural districts.

established Victorian country-house cooks used sheep's blood too. Annette Hope quotes Lady Clark of Tillypronie's advice on "How to use a Whole Sheep or Lamb", which begins: "The blood makes Black Puddings, with sieved oatmeal, or groats, or rice", the fat round the kidney standing in for the leaf fat used with pig's blood. Puddings were everyday food in the big house as well as the croft. The Ochtertyre House Booke of the Murrays of Ochtertyre lists "Pudding and hagas for servts." on 22 November 1737, a Martinmas-season dinner, and "Fish and puddings" when guests came in October; Hope reads these puddings as savoury dishes of the haggis kind.

established White or mealie puddings are the bloodless partner: toasted oatmeal, beef suet, onion, salt and allspice in tripe skins. McNeill notes they kept for months hung up dry or buried in oatmeal in the girnel, the meal chest, and that in Aberdeenshire minced cracklings sometimes replaced the suet. Eighteenth-century Edinburgh had "Pudden Lizzie", whose tavern at Jock's Lodge was named for her mealie puddings, served with wooden pins at each end to hold the filling in.

established The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) defines the modern British white pudding as a sausage of white meat, fat, oatmeal or other cereal and flavourings, and traces medieval forerunners such as the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century "frawnchemyle". In the Middle Ages, it says, the white pudding was almost entirely cereal, usually suet and breadcrumbs, and was made in a sausage skin or sometimes a stomach. The traditional Irish white pudding, according to Theodora FitzGibbon, was shaped like a horseshoe and made mainly of lard and toasted oatmeal. The French equivalent is boudin blanc. The Companion files Scotland's skirlie, oatmeal and onion fried in suet, in the same general category; it notes that the name skirlie does not seem to have been used before the twentieth century and probably comes from "skirl", the noise of the mixture in the pan.

established The Companion also prints Catherine Brown's guide to oatmeal grades, which notes that butchers use medium rough meal for mealie puddings, while pinhead goes into haggis.

Jock and Jame

shared William Dunbar, writing about 1500, complained that the Edinburgh market sold "pansches, pudingis of Jok and Jame": tripe and puddings. McNeill took these to be black and white puddings and says she settled which was which only when she heard a schoolgirl in Moray say she adored "a mealie jamie", a white pudding. That makes the black pudding "Jock", but she never heard it called so. Her reading is plausible but rests on one overheard phrase.

Blood from living cattle

established In the Highlands and islands blood was sometimes taken from living cattle, not only at slaughter. McNeill quotes Hugh Miller's My Schools and Schoolmasters: on visits to an aunt in Sutherland he ate a buttered and peppered blood pudding made from blood let from the farm's yeld (non-milking) cattle, which he explained as a way of sharing summer plenty between beasts and people before the grain harvest. Katherine Grant, writing of Western Argyll, recalled that the stronger cattle were bled in spring by an expert and the blood salted in a tub: "We called it black pudding." Slices were fried in the three-legged iron pot with onion and eaten with fresh oatcake. Neil Munro's story "War" describes a woman making a marag, the Gaelic word for a pudding, from blood drawn from a living cow.

established The practice is recorded two centuries before McNeill. The food historian Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), quotes Captain Edward Burt, an English officer in the Highlands in the 1720s, who wrote that when meal ran short in spring the cattle were bled and the blood boiled into cakes, which, "together with a little Milk and a short Allowance of Oatmeal, is their Food". The cost to the beasts, already starved by the winter, was plain: Burt saw cows so weak that "in the Morning they cannot rise from the Ground", and neighbours joined to help lift each other's animals. Hope links this to the old cattle economy in which cows calved only every second year.

established McNeill does not mention Stornoway or a Lewis pudding by name. Her evidence shows that oatmeal blood puddings were a general Highland and Lowland food, not that the modern Stornoway style is old in its present form.

The Stornoway recipe

established Stornoway black pudding is made from blood, beef suet, oatmeal, onion, water, salt and pepper. Its high proportion of oatmeal gives it a firm, crumbly texture that holds its shape when sliced and fried. Each butcher has their own variation of the recipe, and local loyalties are strong.

Protected status

established In 2013 the European Union granted Stornoway black pudding Protected Geographical Indication status. Under the PGI, only black pudding made within a defined area around Stornoway, following the specification, may be sold as "Stornoway black pudding". After Brexit, the protection continued under the UK's geographical indications scheme. Other Scottish products with protected status include Arbroath smokies and Scotch beef.

From breakfast to fine dining

established Stornoway black pudding is a regular part of the full Scottish breakfast. Chefs have used it in dishes such as scallops with black pudding, and it is sold widely across the UK.

established The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) lists black pudding among the regional extras of the British cooked breakfast, offered at the discretion of the hotel or café. It suggests that the great British breakfast may owe more to Scotland than its "full English" name implies, citing Samuel Johnson's verdict after his Hebridean tour that an epicure, wherever he had supped, "would breakfast in Scotland".

established Black pudding was on the Scottish breakfast table by the 1930s at least. Hope quotes F. Marian McNeill's Book of Breakfast (1932), whose "everyday Scottish breakfast" for winter is porridge with milk or cream, then "Fried bacon with sliced black pudding, boiled eggs", soda scones and oatcakes.

shared It is often praised as one of the best black puddings in Britain, and has a following among chefs. Such judgements are matters of taste.

• Stornoway black pudding is made on the Isle of Lewis.
• It has a high proportion of oatmeal.
• Its name has been protected since 2013.
• Several Stornoway butchers make their own versions.
• Scallops with black pudding is a popular restaurant dish.
• One old west-of-Scotland recipe flavours black pudding with powdered mint.
• In parts of the Highlands blood for puddings was once drawn from living cattle.
• In Moray a white pudding was a "mealie jamie".
• Old Edinburgh street sellers cried "Puddins a' hot, a' hot!"
• The French call a black pudding made with cereal boudin noir à l'anglaise.
• British puddings have several times won the cereal category at the boudin competition in Mortagne-au-Perche, Normandy.
• A fifteenth-century English black pudding was made with porpoise blood and oatmeal.
• The word "pudding" comes, through French boudin, from the Latin for sausage.

• Disputed: How old the Stornoway recipe is. Blood puddings have a long history in the Hebrides, but the exact origin of the recipe is not documented. F. Marian McNeill's evidence shows that oatmeal blood puddings were a general Highland and Lowland food, not that the Stornoway style is old in its present form.
• Disputed: Whether it is the best black pudding. It is often praised as one of the best in Britain and has a following among chefs, but such judgements are matters of taste.
• Disputed: Which of "Jok and Jame" was the black pudding. William Dunbar complained about "pudingis of Jok and Jame" sold in Edinburgh. McNeill took them to be black and white puddings, but her reading rests on one overheard phrase.