Tag Archives: pork

16/11/2025 · 5:09 pm

Blood Ice Cream

Blood ice cream and white pudding

Earlier in the year, the fantastic Fruitpig (sponsors of the ninth season of the podcast) very kindly sent me some fresh pig’s blood so that I could try my hand at making some early modern black puddings, inspired by the recipes of Robert May, Kenelm Digby and Thomas Dawson. I made two versions: a savoury one and another sweetened with sugar and currants – both turned out to be delicious.

Listen to the episode of the podcast with Matthew and Grant aka Fruitpig!

A few years ago I read (I forget where) that blood thickens upon heating just like egg yolks, and I had an idea in the back of my mind that blood ice cream might be possible to make, knowing already that the black puddings of the early modern period were often sweet.

Please that the sweet black puddings tasted good, I set about to see if I could find any British examples of blood ice cream or, at least, something similar. I couldn’t find anything. However, I did discover in the pages of Jennifer McLagan’s excellent offal cookbook Odd Bits, a blood and chocolate ice cream recipe, adapted from an Italian set dessert called sanguinaccio alla Neapolitana: little pots of set chocolate custard, thickened with blood instead of egg yolks.

Encouraged by the fact I knew it could be done, I went about adapting my black pudding recipe into an ice cream. I have a good, basic vanilla ice cream recipe that I’ve been using for years, which in turn is based on my custard recipe, and all I did was swap out the eight egg yolks for 200 ml of pig’s blood. Not convinced that the blood would thicken things sufficiently, I popped in two egg yolks for good measure. The milk and cream were flavoured not with a vanilla pod, but the same aromatics as the black pudding: pepper, cloves, mace and dried mixed herbs. I really wanted to include the currants, but knowing they would freeze hard into bullets, I thought an overnight soak in some sherry would work well –  not unlike modern rum and raisin ice cream. I chose sherry because it’s the closest thing we have to sack, the popular fortified wine of the early modern period, and a common addition to recipes.

Well, I am very pleased to say that it was a great success. It was the richest ice cream I have ever eaten: luxurious, aromatic and with a very slight metallic tang. I ate a scoop with one of my early modern white puddings. What a combination!

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Ingredients

300 ml milk

300 ml cream seeds

½ tsp bl peppercorns

1 tsp fennel

½ tsp cloves

2 blades of mace

1 tsp dried mixed herbs

200 ml fresh blood

2 egg yolks

160 g sugar

50 g currants

a few tablespoons of sweet or medium sherry overnight

Method

Pour the milk and cream into a saucepan. Crack the peppercorns and bruise the remaining spices in a pestle and mortar, and add to the milk and cream along with the dried herbs. Mix well, making sure everything has been submerged, and warm the mixture over a medium-low heat and bring everything to scalding point – i.e. just before the milk and cream boil.

Meanwhile, add the blood, egg yolks and sugar to a mixing bowl and whisk together well.

When the mix and cream mixture reaches scalding point, remove the pan from the heat and whisk in around a quarter of it into the blood mixture. When everything is incorporated, beat in the rest of the cream mixture, and pour the whole thing back into the saucepan.

The cooled blood-custard base and the macerated currants

Now keep whisking or stirring until the temperature reaches 80°C – you can tell this temperature is reached because the mixture thickens noticeably and coats the back of a spoon (check with a difital thermometer, if unsure). Take off the heat and pass the whole thing through a sieve into a clean bowl or tub. Leave to cool and refrigerate overnight. Soak the currants in sherry and leave those to macerate overnight too.

Next day, churn the mixture in an ice cream machine until a very thick soft-scoop consistency. As you wait, strain the currants (keep the sherry and drink it!). When the ice cream is almost ready, add the currants.

Pour the mixture into tubs and store in the freezer. Eaten within 3 months.

The ice cream ready to receive its currants and my serving suggestion!

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02/07/2015 · 10:36 am

The Hors d’Oeuvres: Mediaeval Pork Tartlettes

The first course of my Dinner Party Through Time was a little amuse bouche from a mediaeval recipe dating around 1400. On the throne was Henry IV, Geoffrey Chaucer was a contemporary; indeed, he was present at his coronation.

The recipe calls these little mouthfuls tartlettes, but they are actually more like a stuffed ravioli or even dim sum. Left-over pork is ground up with spices and other flavourings, wrapped up in a paste and simmered in salted water.

Unfortunately there’s no photographic evidence of this dish so you’ll have to make do with a picture of Henry IV and imagine him eating one.

MOU202462 Portrait of King Henry IV of England (1367-1413) (oil on canvas) by English School, (17th century) oil on canvas 50.5x43 Private Collection © Philip Mould, Historical Portraits Ltd, London, UK English, out of copyright

Here’s the recipe:

Take pork ysode and grynde it small with saffron, medle it with ayren and raisons of coraunce, and powder fort, and salt; and make a /bile of dowhg and close the fars thereinne. Cast the tartlettes in a pan with faire water boillyng and salt.

Although it is relatively simple to cook, this was very much a rich man’s dish with saffron and currants as well as powder fort. This was a commonly used spice mix made up of ground ginger, cumin and long pepper. Long pepper is very difficult to source these days, so for my version of the recipe I used regular black pepper.

I could have covered my meat mixture, or ‘farce’, in thinly rolled fresh pasta, but instead went for the less fiddly option of using filo pastry. I wasn’t convinced that the tarlettes would taste good boiled as in the recipe, so for the dinner party, I simmered half of them and baked the remainder. It turned out that everyone preferred the simmered tartlettes. How little faith I had!

This recipe makes around a dozen tartlettes

350g of lean, cooked pork

good pinch of salt

heaped teaspoon of powder fort spice mix

30g currants

1 tbs single cream

1 egg, separated

4 sheets of filo pastry

salted water

Powder fort spice mix:

3 tsp ground cumin

1 tsp ground black peppercorns

1 tsp ground ginger

To begin, mince the cooked pork and thoroughly mix in the salt, powder fort, currants, cream and the egg yolk.

Unfold three or four sheets of filo pastry. It can be a tricky number to keep it from drying out, but you should be able to avoid any major disasters by keeping the pastry sheets covered with a damp tea towel.

Cut a strip of filo three centimetres thick and roll a generous teaspoon of the mixture in the filo strip. You are aiming to cover the filling with two or three layers of pastry so there may be enough in one strip for more than one tartlette. Seal the pastry with a light brush of egg white. Continue until you have used up all of the mixture.

Cook the tartlettes by dropping them into simmering salted water for three or four minutes, remove with a slotted spoon and drain them carefully on some kitchen paper. Eat them immediately.

If you don’t want to boil your tartlettes, they can be brushed with more egg white and baked in the oven at 200⁰C for 8 minutes or so.

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23/05/2012 · 9:03 pm

Rillettes

A brief hop over the English Channel to France for this post…

I have a great love of potted meats – not the awful ones you get in those little glass jars on the supermarket shelves, but the proper job. Making them is easy and satisfying, but you can’t go too long flicking through the cook books and history books without eventually having to give a huge nod to French cuisine. Pâtés are of course well known and popular, but don’t forget the classic rillettes. They’ve been around for at least six hundred years, yet of recent times they have fallen out of favour in Britain, though they were very popular in Victorian and Edwardian Britain – the heyday for savouries such as these:

Rillettes: A French savoury meat preparation, used for hors-d’oeuvres and savouries

Charles Herman, Culinary Encyclopaedia 1898

See? I told you.

Rillettes are a classic, similar to a pâté in that you spread them on toast and eat them with some nice cornichons, but it is made in rather a different way; long slow cooking with plenty of fat is needed and, rather than being pulverised, they are stripped and potted along with their juices. They are subtly flavoured – the glory comes from the slowly cooked meat and the mild herbs. If I were to be a ponce, then I would say they are sublime. However I am not, so I shan’t.

Any kind of meat, or even fish, can be used to make rillettes but the classics are pork, duck, rabbit and goose. The best rillettes come from Tours and Reins.

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 Rillettes de Porc (Potted Pork)

Here’s the recipe I have tried out a couple of times now for rillettes de porc. I can’t wait to get back to England and try some rabbit rillettes (wild rabbits are a rarity in America). There is little variation in any recipe you see, whether found online today or in an eighteenth century cookbook.

Technically you can use any cut of meat as long as it has plenty of fat. I have been using pork belly, but neck would be okay, and for the less squeamish amongst you, the head.

Ingredients

2 lbs pork belly (weight after removal of rind and bones)

2 tbs salt

1 lb back fat

2 cloves of garlic, crushed

3 or 4 sprigs of thyme

2 bay leaves

Freshly ground black pepper

Freshly ground nutmeg

Around 10 fl oz water

Cut the pork belly into strips around 1 ½ inches wide, place them in a bowl and rub in the salt. Cover and leave for around 8 hours. Cut the back fat into cubes and place it, along with the pork belly, in an ovenproof casserole or similar. Tuck the herbs and garlic under the meat in the centre and sprinkle over a good seasoning of pepper and a little nutmeg then pour over the water. Cover with a tight-fitting lid or foil and bake in a very low oven, 140⁰C (290⁰F), for 4 hours.

Remove the foil and take out the bay leaves, garlic and thyme – they have imparted their flavours. Place a sieve over a good-sized bowl and toss the contents of the pan into the sieve so it can drain.

rillettes before

Next – and this the good bit – grab two forks and start stripping the meat and fat into shreds.

rillettes after

If it is easier, do this in a separate bowl. Pot lightly into jars, ramekins or earthenware pots and cover with the salty-fatty juices. Keep covered in a cool place, failing that the fridge.

Serve with thin toast and pickles.

It is very important that the rillettes are spreadable, so if they are kept in the fridge, make sure you let them get to room temperature before eating them.

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