Diwali delights: India's 'kaju katli' vs Britain's black pudding

Indian families recovering from the delights of Diwali and anticipating the joys of Christmas have another hidden surprise awaiting them as the Christian festive season approaches.

Black pudding is as much a part of white British culture as gulab jamuns are for Indians, though few visitors from the subcontinent would recognise it as a seasonal delicacy.

Every winter, a wave of Indian middle-class ambition rolls into London. It drifts along Bond Street, dazzled by fairy lights, past the doormen of Selfridges and the Ritz, Harrods’ glowing façade, and the polished brass of Fortnum & Mason. For many, a London Christmas is the ultimate lifestyle upgrade, the promise of roast turkey, mulled wine and some imagined Dickensian glow of refinement.

Yet a detail the influencers never show you appears quietly, before the carols begin, in the glass counters of British food halls and supermarkets. It is black pudding, that dark, cylindrical sausage proudly labelled Traditional Christmas Fare. Traditionally made from congealed pig or cow’s blood, fat and oats, it is boiled until set, then sliced and fried.

The raw mixture, thick as tar, bubbles slowly in the pan until the fat releases and the surface turns slick and oily. The smell is unmistakable — part butcher’s slab, part burnt iron. When cold, the pudding is dense and rubbery; when hot, it bleeds faintly at the edges, the taste rich and metallic. It tells a story not of luxury but of survival.

In India, the weeks after Diwali still echo with sugar and light, with boxes of kaju katli, laddoos and gulab jamuns circulating between homes, offices, and temples. Sweetness is an offering, not a disguise. In Britain, by contrast, the festive appetite turns darker: meat, suet, blood and booze, survival dressed up as cheer.

Once upon a time, black pudding was the poor man’s protein in the UK. Rural families slaughtered their pigs in November and used every part — meat, fat, intestines, even blood — to last the winter. The blood was collected warm from the carcass and stirred continuously to stop it clotting before being mixed with oatmeal and fat. Early recipes recommended stuffing it into intestines or stomach linings, then hanging the sausages in smoke until they hardened.

What began as thrift in the north of England and Ireland is now marketed as heritage cuisine.

Harrods stocks an Irish brand from Clonakilty; London gastropubs serve it artfully with scallops or apple purée. The bourgeois alchemy is complete: poverty reborn as authenticity, struggle rebranded as tradition.

There are even claims that it featured on extravagant banquets of the aristocracy: one source suggests that King Henry VIII’s breakfast tables at Hampton Court included black pudding. If royalty consumed it, it was a sign that thrift and survival had become spectacle. (There is no verified evidence that the current Royal Family serves black pudding at its table, so the notion remains charmingly unproven.)

Today, it is also a business success story. The Sunday Times newspaper recently profiled Debbie Pierce, the woman who grew the Bury Black Pudding Company from a small market stall into an £11 million enterprise employing more than a hundred people. From waving her company flag at Wimbledon to catching the eye of BBC cameras, she turned a working-class staple into a global brand, exporting to Europe, Asia and the Gulf. The factory in Bury now produces around a hundred tonnes of pudding every week, its output soaring at Christmas.

“Bury is synonymous with black pudding,” she told the paper, a reminder that what once symbolised hardship has become a national emblem, wrapped in nostalgia and pride. Legend has it that monks brought the recipe, rich with spice and blood, from continental Europe to Yorkshire and then over the Pennines into Bury. The story noted that it was once made with either pig’s or cow’s blood, a fact that would horrify most Hindus and many Muslims, yet here it sits beneath Christmas chandeliers, rebranded as heritage cuisine.

Meanwhile, the rest of the British Christmas pageant unfolds in predictable splendour: the golden roast turkey, the steaming Christmas pudding drenched in brandy, Santa Claus parades, carol-singing under icy skies, and the smell of chestnuts and mulled wine on the air.

To the newly empowered Indian visitor — the one yearning to post “Christmas in London” on Instagram — this can come as a quiet jolt. Behind the fairy lights lies drizzle, cold, and the taste of history thickened by habit. The English genius for packaging austerity as charm is never more apparent than at Christmas.

What black pudding truly celebrates is endurance. In a world before central heating, this was breakfast for those who dug coal or hauled nets at dawn. Today it sits beneath chandeliers in Knightsbridge, a relic of the class system it once sustained. Britain calls it heritage; India might call it penance.

For many in the subcontinent dreaming of Harrods and Hyde Park, this is London’s real lesson: glamour built on grit, refinement flavoured with blood and oats. Christmas here is as much about survival as celebration and the smell wafting from the café on a frosty morning is not cinnamon or cocoa, but the metallic scent of thrift.

The lights of London will always do their work. Visitors will admire the window displays, sip the mulled wine, pose under the mistletoe and laugh with Santa’s helpers. But when they next stroll past the Harrods Food Hall and see those dark coils glistening behind the glass, they will also have cause to remember: the lights may dazzle, but the pudding tells the truth.