Blood, Guts & Black Pudding – Ireland’s Dying Art of Blood as Food, by Kate Ryan

I am absolutely thrilled to announce that my new book, Blood, Guts & Black Pudding – Ireland’s Dying Art of Blood as Food, is now available to pre-order HERE and from all good bookstore, published by Nine Bean Rows.

I began researching and writing about the social and cultural history of blood as food all the way back in 2019; never in my wildest dreams did I think back then that seven years’ later I would be sharing the news with you that I have now written a book about it! It’s the first complete text ever published on this incredibly engaging and, yes, even moving part of Ireland’s food history. For all its bloody and visceral connotations, at the end of the day, this is a story about the people of Ireland, their customs and traditions, and a foodway and culture that is fast disappearing. I am proud to have encapsulated all of that together in this one romp through Ireland’s food history spanning from the 1st Century to the present day!

About Blood, Guts & Black Pudding…

Blood.

The Irish have been dining on it for centuries and they love it.

It has sustained warriors in epic battles, staved off hunger, offered protection from bad luck and provided sustenance during winter; drawn from living animals and caught from dead ones, stuffed into guts and boiled until cooked or stirred into bloody porridges over turf fires. It’s in the mortar of castle walls. A Super Food.

Mostly we know it as the moody melange of blood and guts that completes the breakfast fry.

But this bloody food is older than potatoes, soda bread, whiskey, stout and coddle; an ancient food from a time when the Irish diet was one of milky, oaty, salty things. No surprise, then, that the best puddings are made when all four unite to form a singularly perfect food.

Yet Ireland’s ancient tradition of consuming the fresh blood of animals as food is in danger of disappearing forever, and with it an intricate nuanced foodway that ties together the history of Ireland, its people and their communities, rituals and recipe, craft and custom.

Blood, Guts & Black Pudding for the first time charts the complete history of Ireland’s great pudding tradition from pre-Christian times to the modern era, celebrating the many ways blood has been cooked, eaten and enjoyed, and questions what else is lost when the blood is gone.

Pre-Order Today from the Nine Bean Rows website!

Blood, Guts & Black Pudding is Published by Nine Bean Rows

Cover illustration by Chrissie Callaghan at Inky

Book Design by Matt Cox of Newman and Eastwood