Black pudding is an unashamed poster child of British and Irish cuisine, and though it still divides opinion thanks to its contents, we’re firmly in favour of the traditional sausage. Yes, the idea of eating something that contains blood is a difficult one for the more squeamish of us, but there’s good reason for it existing; black pudding started as a way of not wasting any part of the animal. In fact, humans have had much the same idea all over Europe, whether that be making boudin noir in France, morcilla in Spain or blutwurst in Germany. Go back far enough and you’ll find records of similar sausages as long ago as Homer’s Odyssey, which dates back well over 2,000 years. If you can look past the list of ingredients, you’ll find something delicious and steeped in history that is worth celebrating.
Fast forward a couple of millennia and you’ll find black pudding alive and well in Britain and Ireland thanks to Clonakilty – a family-run butcher and sausage maker based in the town of the same name in Ireland’s County Cork. Clonakilty’s black pudding itself goes back a long way; in 1880, one John Harrington sold black pudding out of his butcher’s shop in the West Cork village of Clonakilty. His unique black pudding recipe – inherited from a local woman, Johanna O’Brien – was passed down through generations of the Harrington family for a century, until the old butcher’s shop was eventually put up for sale. When Edward Twomey bought the shop in 1976, he inherited the old Clonakilty black pudding recipe with it – a recipe that had been kept secret for 100 years. Thankfully, Edward chose to keep this slice of history alive and the black pudding produced by Clonakilty today is made to exactly the same recipe as it was by Johanna O’Brien and John Harrington over a century ago.
