Puddings and Loaves

Everything so far in this section assumes the same shape: raw meat is ground, mixed to a bind, stuffed, and then cooked or cured. This page is about the sausages that don’t work that way — the ones where the ingredients are cooked before they become sausage, and where the thing holding the sausage together is not extracted myosin at all.

Blood puddings, white puddings, liver sausages, head cheese, scrapple, leberkäse. They are the oldest branch of the family and in America the most abandoned one. They are also, to my taste, some of the best eating in the whole craft.

The bind is different, and that changes everything

This is the fact that makes the page necessary.

In every sausage on the other pages, the structure comes from salt-dissolved myosin coagulating on heat — the primary bind. Puddings and loaves don’t work that way, and treating them as if they do is why people’s black pudding turns out wrong.

Blood sets by coagulation, not by a myosin bind. Blood is roughly 80% water and about 17% protein — mostly hemoglobin and albumin. Those proteins coagulate on heating exactly the way egg white does, and that coagulation is what sets a blood pudding. Salt is not extracting anything and there is no protein exudate to develop. Mixing hard achieves nothing except making the batter frothy.

Liver emulsifies on its own. Liver is rich in phospholipids and has genuine emulsifying capacity — which is why braunschweiger and leberwurst are so smooth and so forgiving compared to a frankfurter. Liver is doing work that in a frank you’d need a bowl chopper and a phosphate to do.

Head cheese sets on gelatin. Simmered head, trotters and skin release collagen, which becomes gelatin, which sets on cooling. The “sausage” is meat suspended in aspic. There is no bind at all in the usual sense.

Grain-set puddings — white pudding, scrapple, hog’s pudding — are set by starch gelatinization. Oats, barley or cornmeal absorb liquid and swell, and that swollen starch is the structure.

Four completely different mechanisms, none of them the one the rest of this section is about.

Blood pudding

The one people are most nervous about and least need to be.

Getting blood. This is the real barrier, not the technique. Fresh blood from a slaughter is ideal and rarely available. I get frozen blood from a market near the MSU campus, and that is a route worth checking in your own area — international and halal markets are far likelier to carry it than a supermarket. Dried blood powder is the commercial answer and it is what most commercial pudding uses, including brands people think of as artisanal.

Anticoagulant. Fresh blood clots fast. It is stirred continuously as it’s collected, and usually salted or citrated to keep it liquid. If you buy it, this has been done.

The formula shape: blood, fat (usually diced back fat or flare), a cereal or starch (oats, barley, rice, or bread), onion, and spices. Ratios vary enormously by tradition — Irish and British puddings are cereal-heavy, Spanish morcilla often rice or onion, French boudin noir often little or no cereal and much more fat and onion.

The method: cook the onions and the cereal, cool them, combine with the blood and the diced fat, season, stuff loosely into a wide casing, and poach gently — around 175–180°F water, never boiling. Boiling makes the blood proteins seize and go grainy and can burst the casing. Poach until an inserted skewer comes out clean, then chill in cold water.

Loose stuffing is important. The cereal swells. A tightly stuffed blood pudding bursts.

The diagnostic detail: in a good black pudding you should see discrete white cubes of fat against the dark matrix. That is the test of a real one, and it is the thing that separates it from the smooth commercial extrusion. If your fat has disappeared into the mass, it was too warm or diced too small.

⚠ One correction I’ll make because I’ve seen it repeated: black pudding is not banned in the United States. The “sheep lungs” reason people give is a conflation with haggis — black pudding contains no lung. The actual barrier for imports is FSIS establishment certification, which is a paperwork problem, not an ingredient one.

White pudding

The same family, no blood. Pork, fat, oatmeal, onion, spices — often mace, pepper and a little nutmeg. Set by the oats.

It is not “black pudding without the blood” in flavor terms; it is its own thing, milder and nuttier, and in Ireland it’s often the better of the two on the plate. Both live on the Irish breakfast dive along with the argument about which is which.

Hog’s pudding, mealie pudding and skirlie are relatives — the cereal-and-fat family runs right across the British Isles and Scandinavia.

Liver sausage

Braunschweiger, leberwurst, liverwurst, pâté de foie — a continuum rather than distinct products.

The method that works at home: the liver goes in raw, the meat goes in cooked. Simmer the pork (usually shoulder and jowl, sometimes belly) until tender, cool it, then process it with raw liver, salt, cure and spices to a smooth paste. The liver’s own emulsifying capacity does the work.

Cure #1 is used in most of these, both for color — without it liver sausage goes an unappetizing gray-brown — and because they’re often lightly smoked.

Temperature still matters but the ceiling is more forgiving than a frank’s, because liver is helping. You still don’t want to run it warm.

Poach in a water bath to about 160°F internal, then chill fast.

⚠ A false friend worth flagging: Braunschweiger in America means a smoked liver sausage. In Germany, Braunschweiger Mettwurst is a raw, spreadable, fermented pork sausage with no liver in it at all. Two entirely different products sharing a city’s name, and I have seen American recipes cheerfully mix up the two. The German history page untangles it.

Head cheese, brawn, souse

Not cheese, and the name is a translation artifact.

Simmer a split head (or hocks and trotters if a head is a bridge too far) with aromatics until the meat falls off. Pick the meat, chop it, taste and season the stock aggressively — it will taste flat cold — then combine and set in a mold or a wide casing.

The gelatin is the point. If your stock doesn’t set firm on a chilled spoon, reduce it further or add trotters. There is nothing else holding it together.

Souse is the vinegared version, common in the American South and the Caribbean. Sülze is the German. Fromage de tête the French. Testa the Italian.

This is genuinely one of the great uses of an animal and it costs almost nothing.

Scrapple, goetta, and the grain loaves

Scrapple — Pennsylvania Dutch, pork scraps and cornmeal, set in a loaf pan, sliced and fried crisp. Goetta — Cincinnati German, the same idea with pinhead oats.

The method is a porridge: simmer the meat, pick and chop it, return it to the cooking broth, whisk in the grain, cook it out until it’s very thick, pour into loaf pans, chill overnight until firm enough to slice.

Fry it hard. The entire point of scrapple is the crust; a soggy slice is a waste. Hot pan, don’t crowd, don’t move it too soon.

Leberkäse and the loaf sausages

Leberkäse — “liver cheese” — contains, famously, neither liver nor cheese in its Bavarian form. It is a fine emulsion of beef, pork and bacon baked in a loaf pan until the top is dark brown and crusted.

It belongs on this page because it is the point where the emulsion craft leaves casings behind entirely: same chemistry as a bologna, baked in a pan. Bake it until the surface is genuinely browned and cracked — the crust is the dish.

Sliced thick and pan-fried, in a semmel with sweet mustard, it is one of the world’s great cheap lunches.

Handling and safety

Puddings and loaves have a real difference from the rest of the section: they contain cooked ingredients, they are handled a great deal after cooking, and most of them are not cured.

That combination means they are more perishable than most sausage, not less.

Chill fast after cooking. An ice bath, not a slow cool on the counter. This is the single most important handling rule on the page.
Eat within a few days, or freeze.
Blood, liver and offal spoil faster than muscle. Buy them fresh, use them the same day if you can.
Head cheese and souse are eaten cold and never re-cooked, so everything that happens to them after the pot is a food-safety step.

The full framework is in the food-safety chapter of the curing and smoking section.

Why these disappeared, and why I keep making them

These are the sausages of thrift — head, blood, liver, lungs, scraps, grain to stretch it. They exist because nothing was wasted, and they went out of fashion in America for exactly that reason: they read as poverty food at precisely the moment a supermarket meat case made poverty food optional.

That’s a loss, and it’s part of the argument I make in why sausage tastes different today. A whole branch of the craft — the branch with the most flavor per dollar in it — got quietly dropped.

I make them. They are cheap, they are extraordinary, and they use the parts of an animal I’d otherwise be throwing away, which matters more to me the more of my own meat I source within thirty miles.

Part of Making Sausage. Next: troubleshooting — the symptom-to-cause table for when any of this goes wrong.