This week’s Guardian recipe: Black pudding hangover hash…

There’s a thing that happens when your better half runs a pork restaurant – you start to incorporate all things piggy into all meals of the day in the same way that you used to use onions, or garlic, with gay abandon and without question. It starts with lardo on toast, bacon sandwiches for lunch, porchetta for dinner, bacon in ice cream (you’ll have to pop down to Blackfoot for it if you’re curious), and emergency sausages in the meat drawer for the kids, the pasta, the ribollita, the essential top-up of the ‘Vitamin P’. The meat drawer that might as well be called the pork drawer, because it sees nary a sniff of anything else. And then – once you have a reputation as a pig obsessive – people shower you with porcine presents: where they might have once bought flowers, or a card, you get a packet of sausages or a fennel rub instead. A particularly memorable piggy gift recently was from my German friend Lea, who left London a few weeks ago with a trail of Blutwurst in her wake. Soft, dense, meaty and delicious, Blutwurst is black pudding for black pudding obsessives – and so the morning after her boozy leaving lunch-into-dinner the night before, this happened. Hangover food at its finest, with no more foggy-headed incompetency required than to grate some stuff, blearily mash it together, and dollop it into a frying pan. Bliss. And oink.

Makes around 10 fritters.

400g carrots
200g potatoes
1 large onion of any colour
a fistful of parsley
1 large free range egg
4 tbsp flour
400g black pudding

Line a colander with kitchen paper or a clean non-fluffy tea towel, and grate in the potatoes and carrots – potatoes first, as they tend to be wetter, so the weight of the carrots will bear down on them and squish the excess water out.

Finely dice your onion and tip into a large mixing bowl with the carrots and potatoes. Roughly chop the parsley and toss it in. Stir in the flour and egg, and the black pudding, then cover and chill for at least half an hour – this helps the mixture bind together and stops it all falling into a mush in the pan.

When it’s chilled and firmed up a bit, heat a little oil in a frying pan, dollop a few tablespoons of the mixture in, flatten it slightly and fry on a medium-high heat for a few minutes on each side. I served mine with a couple of soft-boiled eggs and some lightly fried bread…

Jack Monroe. Twitter: @MsJackMonroe Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/agirlcalledjack

First published in The Guardian, October 2014.

13 Comments »

  1. arf at ‘when your better half runs a pork restaurant’- I’m sorry, I know, I know- I am immature.

    My brother lives in Germany and has produced a brood of little Germans who eat Blutwurst like coco pops. We had it with some mulberry and prune compote and it was AMAZING.

  2. Oh heaven! I LOVE Black Pudding! Brought up in Liverpool – actually part of Lancashire though we tend to forget – black pudding is a local delicacy and we had it often. PROPER black pudding, not the skimpy little rolls from the supermarket. The best I have ever tasted came from a restaurant in Cork where they served Clonakilty black pudding – to die for!
    Shall certainly try this hash mix, it sounds just perfect for something like Saturday brunch, or indeed, anytime as a hangover cure!

  3. “gay abandon”? “the meat drawer”? “nary a sniff of anything else”? “a fennel rub”? “porcine presents”? “if you’re curious”? Sheejus. And they say Mel and Sue have gone overboard with the innuendoes”!

    Potatoes tend to be wetter? Oh. Emm. Geee.

  4. I’m not the world’s biggest black pudding fan, but I imagine this would also be very yummy with chorizo…I had a chorizo bubble and squeak in London a while back, with a tomato chutney on the side and a poached egg on top – was the breakfast to beat all breakfasts!

  5. all things porcine … why is it that the cheap*) bags of carrots always contain like 1.5 kilos (more than even me and the kids can eat before they go mouldy?). Anyway here’s a solution that goes beautifully with pork (yes, also with black pudding, I just tried and loved it …)

    Pickled carrots and radish: http://battleofthebanhmi.com/how-to-make-banh-mi/pickling/pickling-daikon-and-carrots/ (use an ordinary white radish instead of daikon)

    Then go and make your banh mi, using any leftover pork you’ve got: http://battleofthebanhmi.com/how-to-make-banh-mi/recipes-meat/banh-mi-recipe-black-pepper-pork/

    cheers
    r
    *) in Switzerland, anyway …

  6. I had this for brunch and planned on Jack’s Turkey and chickpea meatballs for tea – but no, I’m still too full and now it’s time for bed – but there’s still some left ready for tomorrow !!

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