Traditional Irish breakfast: St. Patrick's Day and the Sunday morning fry-up

Sunday morning fry-up: Cuts of the Irish breakfast meats known as black pudding and white pudding share a plate with rashers (back bacon), bangers (sausage links), tomatoes, baked beans, mushrooms and eggs. / Image courtesy of Shannon Maria Tisdall tells me the Irish breakfast meats known as black pudding and white pudding are a bit like Scrapple.

Doesn’t explain much to someone who spent years in Eastern PA without as much as a bite of the Pennsylvania-Deutsch slice-and-fry loaves that jokesters first told me were made of “whatever’s swept up from the butcher shop floor.”

So I check the white pudding label: pork, water, flour, oats, spices, dried onion and a few additives. I usually avoid foods with MSG and preservatives, but nothing so bad so far. It’s pretty much the same for the black pudding, except one ingredient: beef blood. Ick!

Tisdall, who sells Irish foods at her Cranford shop Marie O’Neill’s, says the puddings are food born of impoverished times in Ireland. Oats and other grains were added to meats to stretch them. “They used everything,” including the blood, she says. “They couldn’t afford not to."

Since I consider myself a food explorer, I can’t honestly write about something I wouldn’t try. So I pay $3.99 for a half-pound roll of each. Sensing my apprehension as I leave the store, Tisdall calls out, “It’s not like there’s going to be blood spurting out of the side of your mouth. It’s just a head game.”

I thaw the puddings in the fridge the night before the planned Sunday morning fry-up. They’re to be sliced and pan-fried as in the picture above, where they don’t look too bad.

I recall Tisdall’s advice to try the white pudding first. “Really taste it,” she had implored. “Then try the black pudding. You’ll see it’s not so different.”

I still need reassurance, so I call my mom. I remember relatives in her native Louisiana talking of French-style boudin sausages. But she’s never eaten boudin noir, the kind made of blood. Dashing any hope of help as we end the call, she adds, “The Bible is against eating blood.”

The website BlackPudding.org, informs me that some consider blood sausage a delicacy. It also mentions historical religious objections. But it’s the site’s shot of a pudding maker elbows-deep in a vat of the most troubling ingredient that really makes me lose my nerve (it would have been my lunch, had I not eaten hours earlier).

‘You can’t say you don’t like something you haven’t tried,’ I remind myself, and I call up a friend with Philly roots who grew up on Scrapple. I ask if he’ll try black pudding with me. “What’s in it?” he asks. I rattle it off: ‘oats, flour, pork, spices...’

“What else?” he persists. ‘There are a few other ingredients,’ I say. “Does it have blood in it?” I admit that it does. “Who am I, Dracula?” he retorts. But I suggest he ought to try the foods of his own Irish heritage, and finally he agrees.

He shares a cautionary tale of undercooked Scrapple (“It’s gray and grainy with bubbles of fat”) and strongly recommends we “put a hard fry” on the puddings. I open the black pudding and am met with a scent that recalls the dissection frogs of high school biology. It’s muddy brown, soft and paté-like. By contrast, the white pudding is beige, firmer and smells of dried onions and savory spices. My friend notes that the black pudding’s texture is closest to Scrapple, a grind of boiled pork scraps mixed with cornmeal and spices.

I slice the Shannon brand puddings into coins and pan-fry them in a little oil. The black pudding darkens to near black, and the white pudding browns invitingly. When everything is ready, we follow Tisdall’s tasting instructions. The white pudding is like sausage, pleasantly seasoned with an obvious pork flavor and the delicate, finely ground texture she had described. I like it in the way I like pan-fried Spam, and as my friend likes Scrapple — fondly remembered childhood foods given up for health’s sake.

Next up, the black pudding. The scent is still there, but slightly diminished by cooking. I take a tiny bite and don’t taste anything like meat. I finish it, trying to think of a comparison, but it’s unfamiliar, somewhat grain-like. My friend thinks it tastes artificial. I try a thinner, crispier slice and realize that this combination of blood and flour is something like the stuff ("sucs" in French) — including blood — that sticks to the pan when seasoned, flour-coated meats are browned.

As with Scrapple, Spam and other otherwise not-so-appetizing processed meats, the hard-fry changes things. While the judges favored the white pudding in this taste test, maybe black pudding isn’t so strange after all.