Drisheen is the blood pudding of Cork, in the south of Ireland, and it is not a black pudding with a Cork accent. Black pudding is set by cereal: oats or barley swell and hold it together, so it is crumbly. Drisheen is set by protein: blood and milk, with little or no cereal, cook into something soft, smooth and jellied, closer to a savoury custard than a sausage. That texture is the diagnostic. It was traditionally made from sheep’s blood, now often beef or pig, with milk, cream, salt and pepper, and was sometimes flavoured with tansy, a bitter wild herb. It exists because eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Cork slaughtered and salted meat for the Empire’s ships and armies, and the city’s poor got the blood. Its partner is tripe: tripe and drisheen, simmered in milk with onions, sold at Cork’s English Market, and remembered by James Joyce. Tansy is not a permitted food ingredient in the United States, so this version leaves it out. Blood must come from a licensed, inspected source. I have not made this one yet; the formula is built from Cork descriptions and Marianski’s drisheen, and is untested.
Ingredients
PUDDING (about 2 kg / 4.5 lb)
- 1 litre (4¼ cups) fresh beef, sheep or pig blood, from an inspected source
- 750 ml (3 cups) whole milk
- 250 ml (1 cup) heavy cream
- 60 g (1 cup) fresh white breadcrumbs, optional — about 3%; leave out for the softest set
- 20 g (3½ tsp) fine salt — 1% of the mix
- 4 g (2 tsp) white pepper
- 1 g (½ tsp) mace
- 1 g (1 tsp) dried thyme
- 1 knob of butter for the basin or tins (or 45–50 mm beef runner or fibrous casing)
TO SERVE (tripe and drisheen, optional)
- 500 g (1 lb) cooked honeycomb tripe, cut in strips; 2 onions, sliced; 600 ml milk; butter; parsley
Directions
Key ingredients
- In the collection: blood and milk. Its opposite number, the grain-set pudding, is Irish Black Pudding; the oat-and-suet pudding without blood is Mealie Pudding (Scottish Oatmeal White Pudding).
- Strain the blood: pour the blood through a fine sieve, pressing with a spoon, to remove clots and fibrin. This is the sieving the old Cork recipes describe, and it is what makes drisheen smooth; unsieved blood cooks lumpy.
- Season and combine: stir salt into the blood first — salt helps keep it liquid — then the milk, cream, pepper, mace and thyme, and the breadcrumbs if using. Let it stand 1 hour in the fridge so the crumbs soften completely.
- Do not taste raw. Poach a tablespoon in a small buttered cup set in simmering water for 8–10 minutes, and taste that for salt.
- Fill: pour into a well-buttered basin or loaf tins, filling to 2–3 cm from the top, and cover with buttered foil. Or fill casings two-thirds full and tie loosely; the mixture is liquid, so funnel it rather than stuffing it.
- Cook gently: set the tins in a deep tray of hot water and bake at 150 °C / 300 °F, or poach casings in water at 80 °C / 176 °F, until the centre reads 71 °C / 160 °F and a knife comes out clean, about 1–1½ hours for tins. Like any custard, it curdles and weeps if overheated — keep the water below a simmer. A set drisheen wobbles but holds a cut.
- Chill: cool and refrigerate overnight. It firms as it cools.
- Serve fried: slice 2 cm thick and fry gently in butter, 2 minutes a side. Drisheen is delicate; turn it with a fish slice.
- Or tripe and drisheen: simmer the sliced onions in the milk with butter for 15 minutes, add the tripe and heat through, then lay in thick slices of drisheen for the last 5 minutes. Season with pepper and parsley, and thicken the milk with a little flour if you like.
Notes
Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t. There is no protected or official drisheen formula. The structure follows the Cork descriptions: blood (sheep’s traditionally, now often a mixture), milk, salt and fat, sieved and cooked in a gut. Marianski’s drisheen uses 500 g sheep’s blood, 250 g full-cream milk and 250 g cooked oatmeal or breadcrumbs, with salt, black pepper, mace and thyme, poached at 80–85 °C for 60–90 minutes to 68–70 °C inside. Deviations: (1) the cereal is cut from his 25% to an optional 3%, to keep the jellied protein set that defines drisheen; (2) milk is raised to an equal volume with the blood, the common Cork proportion; (3) cream added for richness; (4) final temperature raised to 71 °C. Untested.
Why it sets like a custard. Blood proteins (albumin and the globins) and milk proteins coagulate between about 65 and 75 °C. With little cereal to absorb water, they form a soft gel round the water, the same way eggs set milk in a custard. That is why drisheen is wobbly and smooth, and why it curdles when boiled.
Where drisheen came from. Cork was the great provisions port of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, slaughtering and salting cattle, pigs and sheep for the Royal Navy, the colonies and the Atlantic trade. Blood was a by-product, and blood puddings made with milk were among the cheap foods of the city. Drisheen has been made in essentially one place since, and the O’Reilly family’s stall at the English Market has been its best-known source. James Joyce has Simon Dedalus order “drisheens for breakfast” in Cork in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and in Finnegans Wake (1939) he answers the question “what is the correct garnish to serve drisheens with” with “Tansy Sauce. Enough.”
Tansy. Tansy (Tanacetum vulgare) was the traditional bitter flavouring, either in the pudding or in a white sauce poured over it; Darina Allen gives a tansy sauce of béchamel with a tablespoon of chopped tansy. Tansy contains thujone, and US food law (21 CFR 172.510) permits it only in alcoholic beverages that are thujone-free. It is therefore left out here. Thyme and mace are a mild stand-in, not a substitute.
The name. Usually derived from Irish drisín, of uncertain further origin; not verified here.
Variations. Sheep’s blood alone; mixed blood; cream-heavy versions; some include a little oatmeal or breadcrumb. Old recipes cooked it in a long gut tied in a ring.
Sourcing and gear. Frozen pig’s blood from Asian groceries and beef blood from farm butchers are the realistic US sources; sheep’s blood is rare. A loaf tin in a water bath is the most reliable vessel for a first attempt.
Still open. No historic Cork recipe with weights has been compared, and the O’Reilly family’s own proportions are not published.
Read more on the site. Ireland