Black pudding, boudin noir, morcilla: the same sausage with a different passport?

Boudin noir: France just adds onions. A lot of onions.

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France keeps it simple: pork blood, pork fat and onions go into a casing, and the casing goes into hot water that must not boil. No oats and no rice. In a boudin noir there is no grain at all.

How much onion are we talking about? At Au Roi du Boudin in Mortagne-au-Perche, about a third of each sausage, according to the critic Gilles Pudlowski. One French trade product puts 37 percent on its technical sheet. So if you bite in and think "this is soft and rather sweet for a blood sausage", thank the onions.

It is also the diva of the three. Too much heat and the skin bursts, so it gets low heat, butter and some patience. The classic plate is boudin noir aux pommes, and the Hôtel du Tribunal in Mortagne serves a house-made one with roasted apples and a cider jus.

Mortagne takes this seriously. Its Foire au Boudin has run since 1963, with a contest of more than 500 sausages and flavours like walnut, fig and apricot. On the Sunday, people also compete to eat as much as they can in fifteen minutes. The 2014 winner got through about one and a half kilos. Good luck to that stomach.

Black pudding: Britain looked at blood sausage and thought "needs oats"

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Cross the Channel and the grain arrives. Oats or barley hold a British or Irish black pudding together, which is why it slices cleanly and survives a hot pan next to your eggs. Bury, the town in northern England most tied to the stuff, sells supermarket puddings that list dried pork blood, pork fat, barley and oatmeal.

And then there is Stornoway, on the Scottish Isle of Lewis. Since 2013 the EU has protected its name: only puddings made there, to a written recipe, may use it. So the makers had to put that recipe on paper, as a share of the mix. Blood: 12 to 26 percent. Onion: 15 to 18. Oatmeal: 16 to 20. Beef suet: 37 to 50.

Yes. The largest ingredient in one of the most famous black puddings in the world is the fat from around a cow's kidneys. Their application to the EU says so with pride and names it as the thing that separates Stornoway from other puddings. It also points out that suet is excellent winter food in a cold climate, a claim that is hard to argue with on Scotland's windy western islands in January.

The only seasoning allowed is salt and pepper. The Gaelic name is Marag Dubh, and the application traces it to crofters on Lewis, who shared meat with the neighbours at slaughter and could not afford to waste any part of the animal.

Morcilla de Burgos: the "rice sausage" with more onion than rice

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Everybody in Spain will tell you that morcilla de Burgos is the one with rice. And you do see it: cut one open and the whole surface is dotted with white grains. But its own rulebook tells a slightly different story. Burgos has a protected name too, and the first version of the rules, from 2018, asks for over 35 percent horcal onion, a local variety, and only 15 to 30 percent rice.

An amendment in July 2025, reported by the news agency EFE, went further: onion over 40 percent, rice anywhere from 10 to 40, blood over 9. So a Burgos morcilla can hold more onion than a French boudin, which few people would guess.

The same amendment raised the maximum diameter from 100 to 150 millimetres, because some natural casings came out at over 140. Size is part of the protected recipe. Yes, the European Union has an opinion on how wide your sausage may be.

It is the crumbly one of the three, with whole short-grain rice you can feel in your mouth. People fry it or grill it, and a piece of bread does the rest. One warning before you generalise: "morcilla" is only the Spanish word for blood sausage. Spain's trade body ICEX lists León's with onion and no rice, a sweet one from Galicia with bread, raisins and pine nuts, one from Aragón with nuts and aniseed, and a smoked one from Asturias that goes into fabada, the local bean stew. Ordering "a morcilla" in Spain is a bit like ordering "a cheese" in Switzerland.

“Sosa, grasosa y picosa.”

Can you swap them?

Sometimes, and this is a reading of the textures rather than a law. Black pudding holds its shape, so it is your friend for neat slices in a hot pan. Boudin noir wants a quiet life and low heat. Morcilla de Burgos crumbles, which is great when you want to break it up and brown the filling, and annoying when you promised your guests tidy rounds.

The rest of the family

Once you start looking, blood sausage is everywhere. Poland fills kaszanka with buckwheat or barley, the Finnish city of Tampere packs mustamakkara with rye and barley flour, and Estonia bakes verivorst with pearl barley.

Further out, Korea's sundae (no relation to the ice cream) goes for glass noodles and sticky rice, and Kenya's mutura lands on the charcoal with goat or beef blood and offal. Croatia has krvavica, Portugal has morcela, and Argentina puts its own morcilla on the barbecue. Everybody had a pig or a goat and a reason not to waste anything.

Still curious?