Blood

Morcilla de Burgos, fried in rounds. The white grains are the rice that sets it.

Blood is the offal that most divides people, and one of the oldest prepared foods there is. Blood sausage is mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey. Every pig-keeping culture in the world has a blood dish, and most have several: sausages, puddings, pancakes, dumplings, soups and a blood “tofu” sold in blocks.

Why blood needs a filler — and a spoon

Fresh blood clots within minutes. The traditional answer is to stir it as it cools: the stirring collects the clotting protein (fibrin) and keeps the rest liquid. Mary Randolph’s Virginia House-Wife (1824) gives the instruction in one line: “Catch the blood as it runs from the hog, stir it continually till cold to prevent its coagulating; when cold thicken it with boiled rice or oatmeal, add leaf fat chopped small, pepper, salt, and any herbs.” Modern commercial blood uses a measured anticoagulant instead — US regulations allow 0.2% citric acid or up to 0.5% sodium citrate — and US law says blood for food may come only from inspected-and-passed carcasses and may not be defibrinated by hand.

Blood also needs a filler to set properly — something to give it body. The filler is what distinguishes the world’s blood sausages:

• oatmeal or barley in Britain and Ireland;
• bread, oats, barley or buckwheat in northern Europe;
• rice in Spain, Latin America and Asia;
• onion in La Mancha, potato in Extremadura.

The blood dishes

Swedish blodpudding: baked as a loaf, sliced, fried and served with lingonberry jam.

• Black pudding (Britain and Ireland). Pork or beef blood with fat or suet and oatmeal or barley. Stornoway (Scotland) and Sneem (County Kerry) black puddings have protected-name status; Cork’s version is drisheen; and the World Black Pudding Throwing Championships have been held in Ramsbottom, Lancashire, since the 1980s. Most commercial black pudding is made with dried blood powder. The collection’s recipes are Irish Black Pudding and Irish White Pudding, from the Irish Breakfast section.
• Morcilla (Spain). Morcilla de Burgos is blood, fat, rice, onion and salt; in Mexico it is moronga, fried and served in tacos in Yucatán.
• Boudin noir (France, Belgium, Louisiana). Louisiana’s rarer boudin rouge is boudin blanc with pork blood added. In the collection: Boudin Noir (French Blood Sausage) and Blutwurst mit Graupen.
• Dinuguan (Philippines) — “chocolate meat”: pork stewed in pig’s blood and vinegar, eaten with rice or the rice cake puto. It has a different name in nearly every region — tid-tad in Kapampangan, dinardaraan in Ilocos. The key technique is to let the vinegar boil undisturbed before stirring, to soften its sharpness: Dinuguan.
• Blood tofu and duck blood (China). Fresh blood set with water and salt into a smooth curd; in Chongqing’s mao xue wang, blood curd and tripe cook in a numbing, chile-red broth. (The story that it was invented by accident in the 1940s when a vendor’s wife dropped blood curd into offal soup is folklore.)
• Scandinavia. Swedish blodpudding is baked as a loaf from pig’s blood, milk and rye flour, then sliced, fried and served with lingonberry jam. Blodplättar — blood pancakes — are made in Finland, Sweden and Estonia, and blodpalt is a blood-and-flour dumpling from Lapland.
• Korean sundae — intestine stuffed with blood, glass noodles and vegetables (see tripe and intestines).

A field note: two puddings, with frozen blood

Both a black and a white pudding have been made in this collection’s kitchen, with frozen pig’s blood bought from a market near the Michigan State University campus. Frozen blood is the practical answer for home cooks in the United States, where fresh blood from a slaughter is hard to come by; it behaves well once thawed and stirred. Black pudding is eaten here regularly, and the full account is in the Irish Breakfast section.

Where to buy blood in the US

Frozen pig’s blood is sold in many Asian and Latin American groceries. Why most US blood sausage makers use frozen or dried blood rather than fresh was not confirmed for this page — the likeliest explanation is that small plants rarely collect blood under the inspection rules above, but no source stating that was found.

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In this dive: What offal is · The history · Safety and the law · Liver · Heart and tongue · Kidneys, sweetbreads and brains · Tripe and intestines · Blood · Heads, feet and tails · Gizzards · Game offal · Fish offal · Every part on the list · Corrections