I Hate Black Pudding!

Cormac MacConnell - The West's Awake

I Hate Black Pudding!

March 12, 2008

By Cormac MacConnell

I HAVE a confession to make which is appropriate for this most patriotic of all the Irish and Irish American months. It is a most difficult shriving too because it involves one of those assorted elements which are closely connected with being truly Irish.

These include knowing a few Gaelic words and phrases, at least the chorus of songs like “Molly Malone” and “The Fields of Athenry,” being visibly moved by the second verse of “Danny Boy,” wearing the shamrock on St. Patrick’s Day, being seen ever and anon sinking a pint of Guinness, and having a bit of craic about you when the time is right.

I am all right on all these fronts, but I am totally undone by the fact that I hate the sight of black pudding. Somehow, at least in Munster and Connacht, you are not truly an Irishman or woman unless you lust for black pudding.

I hate the bloody stuff! I gag even at the mention of its name.

There is no way I can share a table at which black pudding is being devoured by others. I lower my head and dash past butchers’ windows in which tons of the stuff are proudly being displayed, especially during the month of March.

It is for this reason that my neighbors often shake their Clare heads sadly when my name is mentioned.

I eavesdropped once in a supermarket in Newmarket-on-Fergus. One woman, nodding after me as I disappeared around the corner of the aisle, clearly did not know I had gone down the other side, right opposite her, separated only by boxes of corn flakes.

“Ah he’s a harmless enough small man,” says she. “But I hear he can’t face a feed of black pudding.”

The other lady tutted sadly and explained, “Of course he’s originally from the North.”

You will always be a slightly suspicious Blow In down here in the Republic if you were born on the other side of the border and don’t eat this dammed black pudding. It’s a painful place to be.

I have noted on my trips over to the States that if the home-based Irish are fond of black pudding, then ye are probably even more besotted. I’ve seen many adverts from Irish delis and stores in the Irish Voice and elsewhere trumpeting the fact that stocks of black pudding are available, as well as white pudding, rashers, pork sausages, Taytos and Jacobs fig rolls. So I am clearly in a small and disadvantaged minority on both sides of the Atlantic.

I have a neighbor, for God’s sake, who drives down to Clonakilty in Cork, the capital of Blackpuddingland, to buy his stock at source. He cannot understand why I will never join him for a feed of this offal stuff.

And it is truly offal, is it not? As near as I can make out, it is composed of the coagulated arterial blood of a stuck pig mixed with various cereals and grains and seasonings which are often (why?) closely guarded family secrets and have been for generations.

All I know is that I have smelt it cooking, but have never ever tasted it and never will. I think the prime reason is the appearance of it, at least here in Ireland.

I will be restrained linguistically, but can I say that a typical Munster black pudding exactly resembles the deposits to be seen on the Main Street of Killarney by the horses of the jarveys. The only difference to my senses are that the Killarney deposits, powerfully but somehow organically acrid, smell a helluva lot better than rings of black pudding on a frying pan in an enclosed space.

Growing up in English-controlled Ulster was a hard place to be for young hungry Papishes, but maybe the only consolation in the end was that you rarely ran across black puddings there.

Rashers, yes, the finest. Spud bread, magnificent. Sausages, excellent sausages, and the finest of eggs.

But black puddings were as scarce as Catholics in the civil service or the police force. Maybe scarcer. And thank God for that.

I have noted that in recent years some producers of this awful offal have changed the shape of the product in an effort to trap the unwary tourist or even local. Those moist black coils of my nightmares are now sometimes processed into a vac-packed block which looks just as unsavory, or into straight sausage shapes about six inches long about which I will say nothing at all.

Whatever shape or size it comes in, a black pudding is a black pudding, as ugly a yoke as ever you saw on a plate.

You know that black melancholy mood which so often comes attached to our genetic cargoes? I would not be one bit surprised if some scientist does not discover soon that such moods are connected to constant intake by the sufferers of big plates of black pudding.

White pudding I can stomach — just about. I will never order it in a café or hotel and will avoid it if at all possible, but I will not have to rush away from a friend’s breakfast table if it suddenly appears before me. I will manage to force it down, with the help of strong tea.

It does not look anywhere nearly so foul as its neighbor, the aroma is not too bad at all, and the taste is bearable. The only problem with white pudding, really, is that it is almost invariably served alongside larger slabs of black pudding and therefore (for me at least) is tainted by association.

I seem to remember that black pudding featured prominently on all your plates over there in the Big Apple around the St. Patrick’s week celebrations, black pudding and corned beef (which we rarely eat over here as a matter of interest!)

When you are assaulting your black pudding with relish just look at it coldly for just a few seconds and identify with the mindset of a poor divil who will never be considered to be a real true Irishman just because he can’t bear the sight of it!

And have a good one all of you. And God’s blessings alongside.

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