Yorkshire Blood Cake (black pudding cooked in a loaf tin)

400ml pigs blood (I used dried 80g dried blood 400ml cold water)

200g of diced pork back fat (or belly pork or sausage meat or lardons)

100g pearl barley (dry weight)

100g rusks (or bread crumbs)

½ large onion – finely diced

(you can vary the spices as you wish but you need salt, pepper, cayenne and nutmeg/mace as a minimum in my opinion)

1tsp ground pepper

1 tsp cayenne pepper

1 tsp ground coriander

2tsp salt

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp nutmeg

2 ground up cloves

2lb loaf tin or 3 x 500ml foil trays

Rehydrate blood

Cook the pearl barley

Gently fry the fat and remove from pan

Gently fry the onions in the fat left in the pan. Don’t brown them.

Mix everything together and put in to a greased loaf tin (or foil trays) It should be quite a thick mix which will keep the fat suspended.

Cover in foil and cook in bain marie in 170°C oven or in steamer until set solid. The loaf tin will be about an hour and the foil trays being smaller will take less long.

You can also cook covered in foil in a steamer.

Let it cool and then cut in to slices to fry.

Looks pretty gross before cooking! With fresh blood it looks a lot redder, but easier to get hold of the dried, and easier to work with too…

Thes photos have more wheat than I now have in the recipe…