Boudin Blanc White Sausage/White Pudding
I have a thick file on old time southern sausage making. Every major city in the South had one or two master sausage makers among its butcher community. New Orleans had John Galpin. Richmond had V. Hechler Jr., Memphis had Sessel, Achner & Co., Nashville had Adam Coe, Louisville had Robert Usher, Macon had Abel Brothers, Savannah had James Gillens, Augusta had W. H. Roberts, Mobile had Smart & Pressler. The good reputation of these masters was greatly important, because no activity in the food processing world was subject to more suspicion than sausage making. Every newspaper in every small town in the republic published stories of sausage makers discovered to be stuffing casings with horse meat, dog flesh, or the overripe remnants of diseased cattle. Then there were the “additives”—bread crumbs, sawdust, gristle, and bean paste. While outing bad sausage in the press shut down bad actors, and prosecuting makers who killed consumers with their product was something of a deterrent, the regulation of the content of sausages did not take place nationally until after the 1920 publication of Upton Sinclair’s expose of the meat packing trade, The Jungle.
If one did not have a reliable local master, the greatest insurance of the quality of your sausage was making it and curing it yourself. And in that century when a smokehouse was a rather common structure on farms, recipes began appearing in print to assist the home sausage maker. While the heavily spiced and seasoned sausages loom in regional memory as a default, the greatest artistry attached to preparations with some finesse in preparation and some delicacy of taste. Foremost of these was the Louisiana boudin blanc. This “white pudding” was ying to the yang blood sausage, or black pudding.
The various formulae for the boudin blanc employed for base ingredients: onions, cream, cooked chicken, and pork meat. L'Art du Cuisinie by the great early Parisian restaurateur Antoine Beauvilliers became available in the United States in 1814, and in English translation in 1824: it gave the following instructions for boudin blanc.
Cook twelve onions in bouillon or consommé with parsley, young onions, thyme, basil, and bay-leaf; hash them very fine. Make a very dry panada of cream; put the onios with it into a mortar, adding sweet almonds that have been put through a search; mix altogether; add some raw yolks of eggs, caul cut in dices, white of roasted fowls hashed very fine; pound altogether, and moisten with warm rich cream; season with salt and fine spices; taste if it is good, and fill the skins. These puddings do not require so much cooking as the black; instead of water use milk; let them cool and prick them, instead of cutting, before they are put upon the grill; the best manner of doing them is to put into a white paper case. The Art of French Cookery (1824), 100.
I think the classic Louisiana Creole version of boudin blanc appears in Mrs. Washington’s The Unrivaled Cook Book (1886), p 138.
Boudin Blanc
Peel and chop in dice twenty onions, blanch them in boiling water, and drain them; cook them in a saucepan with eight ounces of lard; chop and pound equals parts of fat fresh pork and roasted fowl with the same quantity of bread crumbs, which have been steeped in cream, and squeezed dry; mix this with the yolks of six raw eggs, salt and pepper, and half a pint of sweet cream; pour all this I the saucepan with the onions; mix well together, and stuff just as you would blood pudding; cook them in the same manner; when cold, place them on the griddle on a piece of buttered paper, prick them slightly, and cook over a gentle fire.