Pure Pud Pleasure

Quite excited about my recent close encounter with O’Neills black and white pudding. I’ve been eating their fabulous dry-cured bacon – low salt/no water – in both joint and rasher form for a good few years. I normally pick it up in the excellent Kate’s Farm Shop off the Duncannon Roundabout outside Wexford town on my way to our personal little patch of country paradise.

But, thanks to Billy Whitty who uses the black in Aldridge Lodge, I recently happened across O’Neill’s black and white pud and very good pud it is too. In fact as good as I’ve tasted and far outshining some of the more popular and foodie-rated offerings. If you like black pudding that stands firm on the plate yet melts in the mouth, with distinct but not overbearing herb’n'spicing, then O’Neills is for you. Likewise, if you appreciate a bit of texture and bite in your white, especially if you abhor the bready pudding they sell in the average butcher shop.

O’Neill’s hail from Enniscorthy, God’s Own County – Wexford, to the uninitiated. I don’t know where else you can buy their products but, if anyone’s interested I’ll try and find out. Or, if you know, then give me a ‘heads-up’.

I’m aware this is beginning to read like an ad. Let me just say I have no connection with these guys whatever. In fact I’ve never met them.

Speaking of puddings, I’ve just (as I type) received a sample of a new dessert from those inventive guys Cully & Sully. Called Sweetie Pies they are packaged in faux ladies’ handbags, the purchase of which might dent my deli cred for all time!  Sibella, who has just returned from collecting it from the Ballsbridge An Post depot has a message for the lads: “Can you ask them to send us something the postman can put through the bloody letter box?”

More anon, no appetite for dessert after my giant fry-up brunch.