Blood sausage

• 1. Introduction

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  Blood sausage is a sausage filled with blood that has been cooked or dried, then mixed with a filler until the mass sets firm as it cools. Pigs supply the blood most often. Sheep, lambs, cattle, chickens and geese serve too.

  The idea shows up in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe, under a long list of local names. A cook in Kenya, a cook in Iceland and a cook in Thailand might each recognize the other's work. None of them would make the same dish.

  What decides what goes into the pot beside the blood? Why do some places guard the sausage as a festival food while others have nearly let it go? And why does a food so widely eaten turn out to be hard to find in some countries' supermarkets?

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• 2. Fillers That Hold It Together

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  Spain's best-known morcilla, morcilla de Burgos, binds pork blood and fat with rice, onions and salt. It comes in two shapes, cylindrical and gut-shaped. In Albacete and La Mancha, cooks swap the rice for onions, and the texture changes completely. In Extremadura, roughly mashed potatoes give morcilla patatera its creamy body.

  Hungary's véres hurka leans on barley or cubed bread, which is why it also goes by zsemlés hurka and gerslis hurka. Czech jelito uses peeled barley and second-rate pork. The same stuffing served on its own, unformed, is called prejt.

  Across Central and Eastern Europe, the sausage called kishka, a word that simply means intestine, takes buckwheat kasha. Russian krovyanka makes buckwheat the main filler rather than oats or oatmeal.

  Britain went another way. Black pudding generally uses a high proportion of oatmeal, and sometimes barley, to absorb the blood, where continental cooks reach for onions. In the past it was occasionally flavoured with pennyroyal. That short ingredient list sets it apart from its continental cousins.

  Costa Rica breaks a Latin American pattern. Panama, Ecuador and Bolivia usually fill their morcilla with rice. Costa Rican morcilla or moronga contains no rice or other cereal and resembles German Blutwurst.

  In Nepal, Limbu cooks make sargemba from pork intestines, pork fat and rice, then add yangben, an edible wild lichen. In Barbados, batata, the sweet potato, goes in with pig's blood and onions. Browning sauce, which is caramelized sugar, sometimes darkens the mixture where blood once did that job.

  Guyana seasons cooked rice with thyme and basil before stirring in cow's blood. The mixture is stuffed into cow's or pig's intestine and boiled until firm.

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• 3. Beyond the Casing

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  Across Asia, many cooks skip the casing and let blood set into a block. In Hong Kong, the dish closest to blood sausage is pig blood curd. It is made only from pig's blood, and it is not considered a sausage.

  In mainland China, blood tofu, also called red tofu, is most often made from pig's or duck's blood. It is cut into rectangles and fried, steamed or dropped into a hot pot. Laborers in Kaifeng were already eating pig blood curd more than 1,000 years ago.

  Taiwan serves pig's blood cake on a popsicle stick. Pork blood and sticky rice make up the cake, and it is a favourite snack at night markets. In Thailand, blood tofu is called simply lueat, the Thai word for blood. Cooks add it to noodle soups, curries and rice dishes such as khao man kai.

  In Penang, Malaysia, pig blood curd sits in bowls of curry mee, the local curry noodles. Vietnamese dồi tiết, boiled or fried, combines pork blood, pork fat and basil.

  Korea's sundae takes the casing back. Most sundae count as blood sausage, wrapped in pig's intestines and filled with pig's blood, barley and sweet potato noodle. The noodle is a more modern addition. Some variants add sesame leaves, green onion, fermented soy paste, kimchi or bean sprouts.

  Tibetan gyurma are true sausages. Yak or sheep's blood goes into a natural casing of yak or sheep intestine, sometimes with rice or roasted barley flour as filler.

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• 4. The Sweet Side

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  In Romagna, winter brings migliaccio, a black pudding baked inside a thin pastry crust. Its thick dark filling mixes pig's blood with sugar, breadcrumbs, almonds, chocolate, butter and spices. A similar pudding appears across southern Italy under the name sanguinaccio or sanguinaccio dolce.

  Denmark's blodpølse stuffs pig's blood and suet into intestines along with rye flour, brown sugar, raisins, salt, cinnamon and cardamom. It is served with syrup, cinnamon and stewed apples.

  Spain keeps a sweet morcilla dulce in its northern regions and the Canary Islands. Other Spanish varieties bring in pine nuts and almonds. Sweden's blodkorv carries raisins, pork tallow and apple sauce.

  In Uruguay and Argentina, the sweet version is usually called morcilla vasca. It includes raisins and pine nuts, and some vendors go further with chocolate, caramelised orange peels, peanuts and other dried fruits. Brazil and Portugal both make a sweetened chouriço doce.

  Uruguayans, the source notes, are fond of both sweet and salty morcilla. Most restaurants and supermarkets there carry both.

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• 5. Feast Days and Carnival

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  In Estonia, verivorst is a traditional Christmas food. Shops stock a large variety in the holiday season, in many shapes and sizes. People eat it mostly in winter, often with lingonberry jam, and sometimes with butter or sour cream. Puerto Rico also ties its morcilla to the holidays, where it is served fried at Christmas.

  Bulgaria's karvavitsa is flavoured with mountain herbs and eaten warm during the winter. In Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia, krvavica is a wintertime dish, usually served with sauerkraut and potatoes.

  Many Roman Catholics mark Mardi Gras, the last day of carnival, with blood sausage rituals. The name comes from the Italian Carne Vale, a farewell to meat. In Spain, the carnival meal is judías con morcilla, beans with morcilla, followed by the funeral of the sardina.

  In Belgium and the Netherlands, blood sausage is a symbol of Carnival. The link most likely follows the Spanish invasion during the Eighty Years' War.

  In 1552, François Rabelais put forest-dwelling blood-puddings into his fourth book as carnival figures. They were a farce aimed at Swiss and German Protestants.

  Luxembourg's träipen, which includes green cabbage, was eaten in church during Carnival in the Middle Ages. In the Dutch province of Limburg, people still eat it at Carnival for breakfast, baked with apples and topped with apple syrup.

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• 6. Taboo and Regulation

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  Japan has one of the coolest relationships with the dish. After agriculture arrived from the Asian continent in ancient times, Japanese culture was traditionally averse to blood. Blood-based foods remain uncommon, and the general term is kecchōzume.

  Exceptions existed. Before 1945, remote villages in Tochigi Prefecture made soresore by filling tied-off lengths of deer or bear intestine with blood. They boiled it over an open fire until it coagulated, then sliced it into rounds and served it with soy sauce. Matagi hunters of the former Dewa and Mutsu Provinces used deer intestine and dehydrated boiled rice called hoshii. The Japanese are believed to have first met Jurchen blood sausage during the Hamgyong campaign in 1592.

  In Mongolia, the Yasa permitted the eating of animal blood and entrails, which had previously been forbidden. Blood sausage is now popular there, and it is sometimes prepared by the khorkhog method.

  In Siberia, khaan was a pre-Islamic blood sausage of the Turkic peoples. Only the Sakha people make it today, since Islam prohibits blood sausages.

  Law and health rules have reshaped the dish too. Cajun boudin rouge, made by adding pig's blood to boudin, grew rare after the middle of the twentieth century. The communal butchering called the boucherie declined, and government regulations barred the transport of raw blood. Cajun boudin is now usually made without blood, though a black version can still be bought.

  Malta's mazzita was described in the 1750s in a listing of words of Carthaginian origin spoken across Malta and Gozo. Production stopped in 2004 when Malta joined the European Union. No machinery in the country could handle the blood to EU standards. In 2024 the state-run slaughterhouse bought proper equipment, and mazzita returned to the local market.

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• 7. Pride and Migration

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  Stornoway black pudding, made on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, has Protected Geographical Indication status. Ireland has two distinctive varieties of its own, Sneem Black Pudding from County Kerry and drisheen, known for its gelatinous texture. Thuringia's Rotwurst also holds PGI status under EU law.

  In Mortagne-au-Perche in southern Normandy, the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Goûte-Boudin holds an annual contest of international blood sausage specialities. Boudin is considered the emblematic staple of the French Foreign Legion and gives its name to the Legion's anthem.

  Emigrants carried the dish with them. The British and Irish took the black pudding breakfast around the world, and it is now part of local cuisine in New Zealand, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland and Labrador.

  In the United States, blood sausage is very difficult to find in supermarkets. Brussels and Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, each have a local grocer producing it, thanks to large Belgian American populations. Supermarkets throughout Maine carry locally produced blood pudding because of the state's French Canadian population.

  In southeastern Michigan, Polish-style kaszanka is sold in supermarkets year-round. In the San Francisco Bay Area, an Italian-American biroldo combines pine nuts, raisins, spices and pig snouts with pig's or cow's blood.

  German-style blood sausage and Zungenwurst turn up in Fresno and Santa Rosa, where Russian and Armenian delis stock Central European foods. Alpine Village in Torrance, California, used to sell Blutwurst for the German-American population of Los Angeles County's South Bay.

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• 8. On the Plate

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  In Cologne, the traditional Himmel und Erde, Heaven and Earth, puts Blutwurst, mashed potatoes and apple sauce on one hot plate. In Eastern Germany, hot Blutwurst mixed with liverwurst and potatoes carries the name Tote Oma, Dead Grandma. Austria's Blunzngröstl pairs pan-fried potatoes with blood sausage and fresh grated horseradish.

  Sweden's usual way is sliced and fried blodpudding with lingonberry jam, grated carrots and ice cold milk. In Scania, finely sliced apples fried with the pork replace the jam. Finland's mustamakkara, said to originate in Tampere, is considered an integral part of that city's culture.

  In Barbados, pudding and souse is a weekend and special-occasion delicacy. The blood sausage sits beside souse, pickled pig's feet, pig's ears and other trimmings. The cooked meat is cut into bite-sized pieces and soaked in a brine of water, lime juice, cucumbers and hot pepper.

  Kenya's mutura comes with kachumbari, a salad of tomatoes, red onions and fresh coriander, with chili and a squeeze of lemon. The starch is ugali. The cleaned stomach sac and larger intestines are stuffed, boiled for 30-45 minutes, then roasted over coals until brown.

  In the Río de la Plata region, morcilla goes inside a sandwich called morcipán. It also belongs to the asado criollo, a regional mixed grill. In Colombia it appears as an appetizer called picada. In Guyana it is a snack at social occasions, served as cutters with drinks and with a mild dipping sauce called Sour.

  Some English, Scottish and Irish chip shops serve black, white and red pudding battered, as an alternative to fish and chips.

  Spanish cooks have gone furthest with leftovers. Morcilla turns up in omelettes, stuffed red peppers, puff pastry, croquettes, pizza and even flavoured nachos.

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