Many older recipes are sweetened: a 15th-century British pudding combined pork liver, cream, eggs, breadcrumbs, raisins and dates, while a 1588 recipe collection featured a white pudding made of beef suet, breadcrumbs, egg yolk and currants, flavoured with nutmeg, sugar and cinnamon.

[6] By the mid-18th century, Elizabeth Raffald's white pudding recipe, "White Puddings in Skins", combined rice, lard, ground almonds, currants and egg, using sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon and mace as flavourings; by this period the inclusion of offal such as liver or lights, as well as sweet flavourings, was becoming rarer.

Alongside these more refined and elaborate recipes, a simpler form of white pudding was popular in Ireland, Scotland, the West Country and some parts of Northern England, combining suet, oatmeal (or barley in Northumberland), seasoning and onions, in sheep's or cow's intestines.

Modern commercially made Scottish white puddings are generally based on oatmeal, onions and beef suet;[8] the same mixture simply fried in a pan is known as skirlie.

Scottish white pudding is often served, like skirlie, with minced beef and potatoes, or is available deep fried in many chip shops.