The History

During the last few years, many of us have been reading and educating ourselves about how our food is produced, and perhaps how we’d like it to be produced in the future.

Waiting patiently for a moment of retrospective illumination is the humble blood cake. And it’s got something to say. Dating from around 800BC, this small piece of Roman cookery might just hold a sensible perspective on how we could be doing things a little better.

Also known as black pudding, blood cake is an amalgamation of grains, onions, spices, blood, and fat. It’s a clever use of what we now call ‘by-products’, aka products we’ve either forgotten what to do with, or engineered out of our systems in the pursuit of profits. What the blood cake really is though, is a beautiful closed-loop response to the question of what we do with nutritious, abundant, yet volatile produce. It prevents waste, preserves valuable nutrients, and can work in harmony with local production. 

But these days almost every blood cake sold in the UK is produced with imported dried blood. It affords producers greater efficiency and shelf life, but it comes at the cost of provenance and quality. Using dried blood allowed the production of blood cake to take place far from its ingredients’ original source as well as abattoirs themselves. In the UK, local abattoirs have seen a steep decline, from around 1,900 in the 1970’s, to just 249 as of 2021.* It’s a loss that goes hand-in-hand with the continued loss of small-scale farms in the UK. 

Blood cake originated as a solution to a local problem: something that could be made from otherwise-wasted produce near every abattoir. It’s a solution that coexisted with farming for thousands of years. A solution that preserved local nutrients in delicious form. The epitome of sensible cooking, the blood cake is an early blueprint for a way of cooking that weaves its way around local supplies and transforms the available nutrients into something transportable. You can’t make more blood cake than your local abattoir has blood, and why should you?

But now we’re importing dried blood from around the world so we can avoid the hassle of harvesting it properly ourselves. Importing dried blood from around the world (e.g. The Netherlands or China) gives us no control over the conditions in which that blood was produced, which is a sustainability issue as well as an animal welfare one. Blood cake can either be a sad concoction made from industrially reared pigs from overseas, or a product that supports small-scale agriculture, local business, and high welfare outdoor grazing animals in small systems. This latter version is where blood cake can make its stand.

It’s debatable as to whether a fresh blood cake is always going to be superior taste-wise to a dried one. We’re talking about removing water at one stage and replacing it at another. But it’s no surprise to me that the only UK company currently harvesting fresh blood for blood cake production makes the tastiest product I can get my hands on.

Enter Fruit Pig Butchery. Acquiring the correct accreditation to harvest blood is no mean feat, clearly requiring so much determination and drive that no one else actually does it. But not only do the Fruit Pig team show strength of character in their command of red tape and paperwork, they’ve also produced the apex predator of blood cakes.

In practical terms, sustainability is all about give and take. If we take more than we give, the system cannot be sustained because it’s left in a deficit. This applies at all levels, from restoring nutrients to our soils, to cooking carefully with local produce. The Fruit Pig Company Black Pudding is a fantastic example of how we can interact with produce in a far more sustainable way, and the incredible execution of their product is testament to their intention.

There is no solution to sustainability that we can purchase off the shelf - but, like the Fruit Pig team and blood cake itself, we can bloody well make some progress that benefits our communities and environment. 

The love letter

After judiciously frying a generous hunk of Fruit Pig’s own piece of culinary history (that is, their expertly-made black pudding), I plunge my fork through its audibly crackling, cratered crust and am rebuffed by a heady burst of steam. It whets the nostrils with its direct, aromatic heat, and stirs a caveman-like awakening for the alchemical scent of blood. The pudding separates into satisfyingly cloud-like nuggets that bridge the gap between liquid and solid in the way that only carefully coagulated blood can. These soft, glistening clouds cling willingly to the fork in a pleasing crumble, punctuated by free roaming shards of the crisp outer shell like a roughly cast millefeuille.

Fruit Pig’s spices fight for space within the black pudding’s walls. Deep, musky notes spar with piquant freshness beneath a looming backdrop of black pepper. They march right past the line of pleasant balance and throw down a new flag for ‘exciting and bold cooking’. These guys are serious. 

Keep an eye on Two Shef's Instagram for their next pop up, if you can't wait you can also go and see them at Silo. To order some blood cake from Fruit Pig, click here.