Blood Sausages

blood sausages sausages filled with blood, with cereal or other vegetable matter to absorb this, and fat. The most familiar type is the black pudding or boudin noir, English and French terms for much the same thing. It is a pudding in the old sense of something enclosed in a sausage skin.

The black pudding is probably the most ancient of sausages or puddings. Some would claim this distinction for the haggis, but the earliest mention in literature is of something tending more towards black pudding, at least in its filling. Book 18 of Homer’s Odyssey, around 1000 bc, refers to a stomach filled with blood and fat and roasted over a fire.