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I recently had a go at making a fresh blood black pudding, taking inspiration from cookery books from the 16th and 17th centuries. The fresh blood was very kindly sent to me by Matthew Cockin and Grant Harper of Fruitpig, Britain’s last craft producer of fresh blood black pudding, who are also sponsoring the ninth season of The British Food History Podcast. Listen to the episode we recorded here:
We also talked about their hog’s pudding – a type of white pudding – and I felt I had to complete the set and make an Early Modern white pudding as well.
We know where we stand with black puddings: we expect them to be made largely of blood, cereal and fat, but what about white puddings? These are more mysterious, I feel. Modern white puddings are made from ground pork, pork fat, breadcrumbs and rusk or oats, plus lashings of white pepper, and are today associated largely with Scotland and Ireland. There used to be a rich diversity of white puddings right across Britain and Ireland, their contents highly variable, the only prerequisite being that the finished product would come out white. In the Early Modern Period, they were lavish ‘puddings of the privileged’[1], and had more in common with French boudin blanc than modern British white puddings. There was plenty of eggs, milk and cream, and the meat used (if any) was suitably pale in colour: Kenelm Digby’s recipe contained the meat of ‘a good fleshly Capon’ as well as streaky bacon,[2] Thomas Dawson’s was made with a calf’s chauldron, i.e. intestines.[3] Some recipes contain no meat at all: rice pudding could be counted as a form of white pudding in this context. Things do begin to get confusing, however, because some white puddings made with pork are called hog’s puddings, but only some. As Peter Brears wrote in an article on white and hog’s puddings:
On studying these recipes, one rather surprising fact becomes particularly obvious; there is no material significance in the various names given to such puddings. Whether called hog’s or white puddings, their ingredients might be identical, or quite disparate, while many contain absolutely no pork whatsoever.[4]
Today, hog’s puddings are associated with Devon and Cornwall. Fruitpig’s hog’s pudding uses a base of bacon and oats. We can muddy the water even further because a hog’s/white pudding if made with pig’s liver could also go by the name of leverage pudding.
After a great deal of flicking through cookery books, I decided to make Gervase Markham’s white pudding from his classic The English Housewife (first published 1615), mainly because I had most of the ingredients in the house.
As you can see, Markham’s recipe contains no meat (aside from the beef suet and the pudding casings themselves).[5]
I have to say, they were a triumph! They freeze well and are easy to reheat. When it comes to serving them, let them cool for 5 minutes before cutting into them. The best way I have discovered to eat them (so far) is with crispy smoked bacon and golden syrup. Breakfast of champions.
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Makes 6 x 375 g (approx.) puddings:
500 g cracked oat groats or pinhead oatmeal (steel-cut oats)
500 ml whole milk, plus 2 tbs for the saffron (and possibly extra, see recipe)
Around 2.5 metres of beef casings
600 ml whipping or double cream
150 g suet
130 g caster sugar
2 whole eggs plus 4 egg yolks
60 g sliced dates
60 g currants
¼ tsp ground black pepper
1/8 tsp ground cloves
¼ tsp ground mace
2 tsp salt
A 2-finger pinch of saffron
The day before you want to make your puddings, place the oats in a bowl or jar and pour over the milk. Cover and refrigerate. Soak your beef casings in fresh water, cover and refrigerate too.
Next day make the pudding mixture: in a large mixing bowl add the milk-soaked oats, cream, suet, sugar, eggs, dates, currants, ground spices and salt. Stir well. Warm up the 2 tbs of milk, add the saffron strands and allow them to infuse and cool, then stir into the mixture.
Now let everything meld together for a couple of hours so that the whole mixture is the consistency of spoonable porridge. If your oats were particularly absorbent, you may need to loosen the mixture with a few tablespoons of extra milk.
Cut the soaked beef casings into 35 cm lengths and tie the ends securely with string. Now it’s time to attach a funnel to the other end of your first length of gut. I used a jam funnel and secured it with more string.
Hold the funnel in one hand and add small ladlefuls of mixture into the gut. It should slip down relatively easily. Keep the funnel raised and try to massage out any large air bubbles. When the gut is around two-thirds to one-quarter full, remove the end tied to the funnel, press out any air and tie with more string. The casings are slippery and so you must make sure that the knots are made at least 2.5 cm/1 inch from the ends. I found 350 g mixture to be a good amount. Now tie the ends together with more string to make that classic pudding shape.
Keep them covered as you get a large pot of water simmering.
Cook the puddings in batches: drop three into the water and let them gently poach for 35 minutes – there should just be the odd bubble and gurgle coming from the cooking water. You must pop any bubbles immediately with a pin, otherwise the puddings will burst open. Turn the puddings over every 7 or 8 minutes to make sure both sides are cooked evenly.
When cooked, fish the puddings out and hang them up to dry for a few hours, then refrigerate.
To cook the puddings, poach them in more water for around 15 minutes, turning occasionally.
[1] Davison, J. (2015). English Sausages. Prospect Books.
[2] Digby, K. (1669). The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Opened (1997 reprint) (J. Stevenson & P. Davidson, Eds.). Prospect Books.
[3] Dawson, T. (1596). The Good Housewife’s Jewel (1996 Editi). Southover Press.
[4] Brears, P. (2016). Hog’s Puddings and White Puddings. Petits Propos Culinaires, 106, 69–81.
[5] This recipe is from the 1633 edition: Markham, G. (1633). Country Contentments, or The English Huswife. J. Harison.
Filed under Britain, cooking, food, General, history, Puddings, Recipes, Seventeenth Century, Uncategorized
For years now, I have wanted to make my own fresh blood black puddings, but fresh blood is so tricky to get hold of in Britain, I thought I would never get the opportunity. Lucky for me then, that Fruit Pig, who are sponsoring the ninth season of The British Food History Podcast, kindly sent me a litre of pig’s blood. When it came to recipes, I very much had my eye on Early Modern black puddings because they seem so outlandish compared to traditional black puddings of today. On one hand, they are very British, containing oatmeal and/or breadcrumbs and plenty of chopped beef suet. On the other, they are reminiscent of a French boudin noir in that there are lashings of cream and egg yolks.
There are lots of unexpected herbs and spices, too. Thomas Dawson uses sheep’s blood, milk-soaked oats, suet and what we might think of as the constituents of a mixed spice today: nutmeg, mace, black pepper, ginger and cinnamon.[1] Sir Kenelm Digby liked to use chicken blood, cream, almond cream, bone marrow, sugar, salt, rosewater and eggs.[2] Robert May gives us some precise pointers as well as several ways of making black puddings. In one recipe he combines blood and cream in a ratio of 2:1. Sometimes he soaks oats in milk, sometimes blood: ‘Steep great oatmeal in eight pints of warm goose blood, sheeps blood, calves, or lambs, or fawns blood’. He uses a whole range of interesting herbs, including thyme, spinach, parsley, sorrel and strawberry leaves, to name but a few. He also adds ‘Sometimes for variety, Sugar, Currans, &c.’[3] I really want to know what sweet black pudding tastes like!
Using these descriptions as inspiration, I created the recipe below. There was a certain amount of trial-and-error, and whenever I got stuck, I made sure to gain advice from Regula Ysewijn’s Pride and Pudding, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s The River Cottage Cookbook and Fergus Henderson’s The Complete Nose to Tail.[4]
I learned a great deal making them – the most important lesson being just how skilled one must be to make these sorts of puddings frequently and in large amounts. It made me appreciate even more the hard work of our forebears and Fruit Pig!
I was really surprised with how well the puddings turned out, and I would certainly recommend giving them a go. I made one batch with sugar and currants and one without. You might be surprised to hear that the sweet one was really quite delicious. I fried my savoury puddings and served them with fried eggs atop some sourdough toast. They tasted rich and were a cross between a black pudding and haggis. I’ll let you know how I served the sweet black puddings.
There are just a couple of things I would have done differently: my main issue was that the butcher gave me pigs’ casings which were not suitable for these black puddings – the nubbly pieces of oat tore through them easily, and the skin burst under their own weight at times. I would therefore recommend beef casings or simply baking them in the oven in loaf tins, or maybe even frying up blood pancakes as suggested by Regula Ysewijn![5]
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Makes approximately 12 x 20 cm black puddings if made in pork casings, and 6 x 20 cm puddings if made in beef casings.
600 g pinhead oats
Milk (see recipe)
1 tsp fennel seeds
½ tsp cloves
½ tsp black peppercorns
3 blades of mace
1 ½ tsp dried, mixed herbs
2 tsp salt
900 ml fresh pig’s blood (or reconstituted dried blood)
600 ml double cream
200 g chopped beef suet
2 whole eggs, beaten
140 g currants (optional)
320 g sugar (optional)
Natural pork or beef skins, soaked in water overnight (optional, see recipe)
The day before you want to make your puddings, place the oats in a bowl or large jug and pour in enough milk to just cover them. Place in the fridge overnight. Grind the spices and mix in the dried herbs and salt.
Next day, place all of the ingredients (aside from the casings, if using) in a large mixing bowl. Combine and allow everything to mingle, dissolve and absorb; around an hour – or more if you have the time.[6]
Once everything has had the chance to macerate and absorb, it is time to assemble the puddings. I used my sausage stuffer funnel from the Kitchen Aid and attached a length of pork casing onto it, then secured it with some string and knotted the end. Then I set about filling the casings, a spoon at a time, letting the skins naturally fill and fall into a bowl. Then I tied a link off with some string, making sure the casing wasn’t full and there were no obvious air bubbles. The lengths of the puddings were around 20 cm – though I wasn’t very consistent. In retrospect, I would recommend using beef casings tied to a wide-mouthed jam funnel, much easier to fill and no constant tearing.
Once all of the mixture is used up, get a large pot of water to a good simmer and gingerly plop them in a few at a time. Three was a good number. Keep the water at a gentle simmer and arm yourself with a pin and pop any bubbles that appear in the cooking puds, lest they burst. They will take around 20 minutes to cook, and you must watch them like a hawk, pin poised and ready to pop. You can tell they are done when the liquid that comes out of a freshly-pricked pudding is clear. If using beef casings, they will take 30 to 35 minutes to cook.
Carefully remove the puddings and either hang them up or lay them on a cooling rack to dry for a few hours before placing them in the refrigerator.
You can avoid all of this faff by baking the mixture in large loaf tins sat in a bain-marie for around 1½ hours at 160°C.[7]
Notes
[1] Dawson, T. (1596). The Good Housewife’s Jewel (1996 Edition). Southover Press.
[2] Digby, K. (1669). The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Opened (1997 reprint) (J. Stevenson & P. Davidson, Eds.). Prospect Books.
[3] May, R. (2012). The Accomplisht Cook (1660/85) (A. Davidson, M. Bell, & T. Jaine, Eds.; 1685th ed.). Prospect Books.
[4] Fearnley-Whittingstall, H. (2001). The River Cottage Cookbook. Collins; Henderson, F. (2012). The Complete Nose to Tail: A Kind of British Cooking. Bloomsbury; Ysewijn, R. (2015). Pride and Pudding: The History of British Puddings Savoury and Sweet. Murdoch Books.
[5] Ysewijn (2015)
[6] Note: Looking back on these initial stages, it would have been much better to soak the oats in the blood overnight, mix everything together in the morning, let everything meld and mingle for a couple of hours, and then add enough milk to make a mixture of a spoonable porridge consistency. We live and learn.
[7] Note: I haven’t tested this method; these instructions have been extrapolated from the Fergus Henderson recipe for blood cake in Henderson (2012).
Welcome to the first episode of season 9 of The British Food History Podcast! I am going to be adding a blog post to complement each new episode of the podcast, to help readers of the blog keep tabs on what is going on.
Today I am talking with Matthew Cockin and Grant Harper of Fruit Pig – the last remaining commercial craft producer of fresh blood black puddings in the UK.
Fruit Pig are sponsoring the 9th season of the podcast and Grant and Matthew are very kindly giving listeners to the podcast a unique special offer 10% off your order until the end of October 2025 – use the offer code Foodhis in the checkout at their online shop, www.fruitpig.co.uk.
We talk about how and why they started up Fruit Pig, battling squeamishness, why it’s so difficult to make fresh blood black puddings, and serving suggestions – amongst many other things
The podcast is available on all podcast apps, aandd now YouTube. Please give it a follow, and if you can, please rate and review. If you’re not a podcasty person, you can listen via this Spotify imbed:
One other thing we talked about was serving suggestions, and of course a slice or two of black and white pudding as part of a full English breakfast is admirable. You can go one better and have the full triple of black pud, white and haggis for a full Scottish! Personally, I believe a slice of fried bread topped with a couple of slices of fried pudding and a poached egg is the breakfast of champions.
These puddings are not just for breakfast, though. In Lancashire, a favourite way of eating black pudding is to poach it again, remove it from the water, drain, split lengthways and spread it with mustard. I have eaten it this way when visiting Bury Market. But my favourite way of eating black and white pudding in a simple way, is to serve fried slices of pudding with mashed potatoes and apple sauce – hot or cold, not too sweet. Here’s how to make a good ‘savoury’ apple sauce:
Peel, core and slice 2 medium-sized Bramley apples, and 2 tart dessert apples (e.g. Cox’s Orange Pippin) and fry in a saucepan with 60 g salted butter and a good few grinds of pepper. When the Bramleys start to soften, add 2 level tablespoons of sugar and 4 or 5 tablespoons of water. Cover and cook on medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the apples are cooked through and the Bramleys have broken down to a puree. Taste and correct seasoning. You need something still very tart to cut through the rich puddings.
Keep a lookout for a proper recipe and some of my experiments with the fresh blood, Matthew and Grant kindly sent me.
If you can, support the podcast and blogs by becoming a £3 monthly subscriber, and unlock lots of premium content, including bonus blog posts and recipes, access to the easter eggs and the secret podcast, or treat me to a one-off virtual pint or coffee: click here.
This episode was mixed and engineered by Thomas Ntinas of the Delicious Legacy podcast.
Things mentioned in today’s episode
Fruit Pig on Jamie & Jimmy’s Friday Night Feast
Fruit Pig on BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme
Neil’s appearance on Comfortably Hungry discussing black/blood pudding
Museum of Royal Worcester project wins a British Library Food Season Award
Follow Serve it Forth on Instagram at @serveitforthfest
Podcast episodes pertinent to today’s episode
The Philosophy of Puddings with Neil Buttery, Peter Gilchrist & Lindsay Middleton:
18th Century Female Cookery Writers with The Delicious Legacy:
Neil’s books:
Before Mrs Beeton: Elizabeth Raffald, England’s Most Influential Housekeeper
Knead to Know: a History of Baking
Don’t forget, there will be postbag episodes in the future, so if you have any questions or queries about today’s episode, or indeed any episode, or have a question about the history of British food please email me at neil@britishfoodhistory.com, or leave a comment below.
At the end of 2024, I gave you my recipe for Bakewell pudding. The plan was to follow with my recipe for Bakewell tart. Alas, life, Christmas and then a holiday to New Zealand got in the way.
But I always get around to things eventually and I give it to you today!
The Bakewell tart, despite it being dearly loved by Brits, was originally made as a cheap, dumbed-down version of the rich Derbyshire pudding: the puff pastry swapped for shortcrust, and the buttery almond filling swapped for an almond-flavoured sponge cake.
I write about the histories of the Bakewell pudding and tart in Knead to Know: A History of Baking, so pick up a copy if you want to know more.
I have been using this recipe for years now and it’s a real crowd-pleaser. When the restaurant was open, I served this tart warm with a lemon-flavoured cream and received a big bear hug from a diner: there could have been no better seal of approval in my book! The secret to its success is that I make a frangipane rather than a sponge cake filling, bound together with just a tablespoon of flour.
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Makes 1 x 21 cm/8 inch tart
For the sweet shortcrust pastry:
200 g plain flour
100 g salted butter, diced (or half-and-half butter and lard)
50 g caster or icing sugar
1 egg, well beaten
Cold water (see recipe)
For the filling:
100 g salted butter, softened
100 g caster sugar
2 eggs
100g ground almonds
30 g self-raising flour
¼ tsp almond extract
3 or 4 tbs raspberry jam
30 g slivered almonds
First, make the pastry: Place the flour and fat(s) in a mixing bowl and rub the fat in until the mixture resembles fresh breadcrumbs. You can do this by hand using fingertips or with the flat beater of a stand mixer on a slow speed. Make a well in the centre and add most of the egg. If using a stand mixer, slowly mix it in, pouring more egg into any dry patches. If doing by hand, use a butter knife to mix (this prevents overworking of the dough). You should have a cohesive dough that can be brought together with your hand – if it does seem dry, add a tablespoon of cold water.
Knead briefly, cover and allow to rest in the fridge for 20 to 30 minutes. Meanwhile, preheat your oven to 180°C and place a baking tray on the centre shelf
On a lightly floured work surface, roll out the pastry to the thickness of a pound coin, and use it to line an 8”/20 cm loose-bottomed tart tin or ring.[1] Prick the base with a fork and place it back in the fridge to firm up.
Now make the filling: using a hand beater or stand mixer, beat together the soft butter, caster sugar, eggs, almonds, flour and extract until smooth.
Take the pastry out of the fridge and spread jam over the bottom leaving a centimetre gap all around the inside edge. Spoon or pipe the mixture first around the edges and then the centre (this stops the jam from rising up the sides of the pastry lining), levelling off with a spatula.
Sprinkle with the slivered almonds and slide the tart onto the hot baking sheet and bake for 40 minutes, turning the heat down to 160°C if the top gets too brown. Cool on a rack, and remove from the tin when just warm.
[1] You will find that there is excess pastry – make some nice jam tarts or turnovers.
I was at the Foyles Winter Evening on the 28th of November promoting The Philosophy of Puddings. It was at their flagship Charing Cross Road store, adjacent to Soho, and it was all very exciting. To draw folk in, I brought two puddings from opposite ends of the pudding spectrum: a nice, but very sweet, Bakewell pudding and a very savoury black pudding. I’m sure you can guess which was the most popular (by the way, tune into this podcast episode to hear about my gaff involving Rick Astley and the black pudding).
I promised I would post the recipe for a Bakewell pudding because it went down so well at the event. A Bakewell pudding is different from a Bakewell tart: the pudding is made up of a puff pastry case, a layer of raspberry jam, and then a sweet mixture of melted butter, eggs, sugar, and ground almonds. It’s very sweet and seems to be derived from a tribe of puddings called transparent puddings.[1]
The recipe for Bakewell pudding is a closely-guarded secret held by the several bakeries in Bakewell who reckon they have the original recipe. I won’t go into the history of the pudding here, it can all be found in the Philosophy of Puddings and Knead to Know.[2] However, Sheila Hutchins provides a recipe in her excellent 1967 book English Recipes and Others which she obtained from ‘Mr Oulsnam, the cook at the Rutland Arms in Bakewell where the pudding was said to be invented’.[3] There are recipes too in Jane Grigson’s English Food (1992) and Regula Ysewijn’s Pride and Pudding (2015). The first recipe appears in Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845), and it doesn’t have a crust, and is made with egg yolks, not whole eggs.[4]
All of the recipes vary slightly, but I have gone with something that resembles the modern version, though my filling has a higher proportion of ground almonds than the Rutland Arms recipe (but not too much because it begins to veer on Bakewell tart territory. I feel I have the balance just right, but you can be the judge of that.
By the way, the finished pudding isn’t a particularly beautiful-looking thing, it won’t come out of the oven looking like French patisserie, it’s wonky and slightly scruffy but very delicious; as a pudding should be.
Apologies for the lack of a photo of the interior! I was stressed on the night and forgot to take one, but here I am with the pudding in Foyles.
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My recipe makes 1 x 23 cm/9 inch (approx.) pudding in a round tin with sloping sides. The great thing about puddings is that they are very forgiving, so if your tin has straight sides or fluted edges, or not exactly the right dimensions, don’t worry, it will be fine.
The pastry is not blind-baked first. To avoid the dreaded soggy bottom put a baking tray in the oven so it can get nice and hot. When the pudding is ready to bake, sit it on the very hot tray which will help crisp it up before it starts to turn soggy.
1 batch of Quick and Easy Puff Pastry
120 g butter
120 g caster sugar
80 g ground almonds
2 eggs
A few drops of almond essence
2 to 3 dessertspoons of raspberry jam
Preheat your oven to 220°C and place a baking tray on the centre shelf.
Begin by rolling out the pastry to the thickness of a pound coin (3 mm approximately). Allow to rest for a couple of minutes before lining the tin with the pastry. Make sure the pastry is tucked into the edges properly and that there are no air bubbles. Trim with a knife or rolling pin (whichever is most efficient – depends upon your tin!) and prick the pastry all over with a fork so that it doesn’t puff up too much in the oven.
Place the lined tin in the fridge so the butter can harden up. Meanwhile, make the filling: slowly melt the butter in a saucepan, as you wait, mix the sugar and ground almonds in a mixing bowl, then the eggs and almond essence. When the butter is just melted beat it into the mixture.
Take the lined tin out of the fridge and spread with the jam, leaving a gap all around the inside edge.
Spoon or pour the mixture, first around the inside edge and then the centre, smoothing over any gaps.
Place in the oven on the now very hot baking tray for 25 to 35 minutes, turning the temperature down to 180°C when the top reaches a nice, deep golden brown (it was around the 20-minute mark for me).
When the centre is set, remove it from the oven and allow it to cool on a wire rack.
[1] Buttery, N. The Philosophy of Puddings. (British Library Publishing, 2024).
[2] Being a baked pud, Bakewell pudding gets mentioned in both The Philosophy of Puddings and Knead to Know: a History of Baking (though different aspects are discussed).
[3] Hutchins, S. English Recipes, and Others from Scotland, Wales and Ireland as They Appeared in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Cookery Books and Now Devised for Modern Use. (Cookery Book Club, 1967).
[4] Acton, E. Modern Cookery For Private Families. (Quadrille, 1845); Grigson, J. English Food. 3rd edition (Penguin, 1992); Ysewijn, R. Pride and Pudding: The History of British Puddings Savoury and Sweet. (Murdoch Books, 2015).
It’s competition time!
Would you like to be in with a chance of winning a signed copy of both of my new books Knead to Know: A History of Baking and The Philosophy of Puddings? Well here is your chance.
It is very simple to enter: All you need to do is go to the foot of this post, “like” it and leave a comment declaring your favourite Christmastime dessert.
I will select one person at random on 2 December at 7pm GMT. That’s your deadline. Good luck!
If you like the blogs and podcast I produce and would to start a £3 monthly subscription, or would like to treat me to virtual coffee or pint: follow this link for more information. Thank you.
Hello there folks. A very quick post just to let you all know that I am giving two free talks this December.
The first is taking place at Manchester Central Library at 6pm on 5 December and is entitled The History of Pies & Puddings. Because it’s December I shall be looking at some festive examples but also a few other favourites. There will also be some of the library’s antiquarian cookery books to view as part of it. Book your spot here.
The second is a free Zoom talk on 17 December at 7pm (GMT) called The Philosophy of Puddings where I will look at the history of this very British food in the kitchen and in our culture. Will any of your favourites be mentioned? Book your spot here.
There are new events cropping up all of the time so make sure that you check the Upcoming Events tab regularly.
Looking forward to seeing some of you there!
If you like the blogs and podcast I produce and would to start a £3 monthly subscription, or would like to treat me to virtual coffee or pint: follow this link for more information. Thank you.
I’m very excited to announce that my next book The Philosophy of Puddings with be published on 24 October 2024, published by the British Library – part of their excellent The Philosophy of… series.
Preorder The Philosophy of Puddings from your favourite bookseller, or from the British Library bookshop.
The word ‘pudding’ is a confusing one if you are not from the British Isles because so many things can be a pudding: steamed sponge, Christmas pud, sticky toffee pudding, plus black and white pudding AND haggis. Add to this the fact that pudding can also be a byword for any dessert. Convoluted craziness.
I have tried to tackle the tricky etymology of the word before – puddings change and morph into so many different things across time that it’s pretty mind-boggling, and I’m so glad to have the opportunity to really study it in depth: a dream come true really. As far as I know there isn’t a book that tracks the word right through history, focussing not just on trends and fashions but also why puddings are so important in British identity.
Here’s what the blurb says:
Just what is a pudding? We all have our favourites, whether it is a school-dinner jam roly-poly with custard, or a Yorkshire with onion gravy, a Burns’ Night haggis or the Christmas plum pudding. The humble pudding started out as a meat boiled in either animal intestine or in a cloth. With the advent of pudding bowls and moulds, the pudding assumed a myriad of identities. Neil Buttery traces the long history of pudding and its importance in British culture and language. He has tried and tested many recipes from across the centuries in his ‘Pud Club’ and shares his extensive knowledge and expertise.
The Philosophy of Puddings features stunning images and photographs from the Library’s collections.
I will present some of my research an online talk in December – the date is to be announced, so make sure you keep an eye out on social media or the ‘Upcoming Events’ page on the blog.
Exciting announcement time!
I am very pleased to announce that I have a new book out next month. It’s called Knead to Know: A History of Baking, published by Icon Books and out in the shops on 12 September 2024.
Notice it’s A history, not THE history of baking. I’ve taken what I think are the most important parts, or thing I have found the most interesting with respect to the history of this huge sprawling subject. I’ve broken it up into five broad chapters: Griddlecakes & Pancakes; Biscuits & Cakes; Bread; Pies & Puddings; and Patisserie. Really, I could have written a whole chapter on each of these subjects!
It’s in a different format to my previous books in that the chapters are broken up into short pieces, the length of a blog post. This means that you can dip in and out of it like a coffee table book, or read it cover to cover.
It’s not a recipe book, but there are lots of baking tips and rules of thumb. Of course, recipes for many of the foods that crop up in the book you can find on this blog, and I’ll be adding more as the year goes on, so keep a look out.
It is available to preorder from your favourite bookseller.
There are several upcoming events: online and in-person talks, plus festival appearances, details of which can be found on the Upcoming Events tab of the blog.
British Food: A History 