[Sca-cooks] hanging meat:::was PETA

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Heleen Greenwald:

>ps... OK.... recipe for blood sausage Philp?  Anyone?  And <question> would
>blood sausages be a delicacy for taste or more just to use up the blood and
>not be wasteful. (Well,.... everything is a matter of taste... so more
>acurately.  Does this recipe exist mainly not to waste the blood?

You might say that, but then you could also say the recipe for 
chateaubriand exists so as not to waste the tenderloin of beef that 
is a byproduct of man's quest for hamburgers.

If you like it, it's a delicacy. The bottom line is that it's a 
useful protein source, and for the cultures that eat foods containing 
blood (which is most agricultural societies), there seems to be 
little or no evidence that they feel it's sort of a necessary evil. 
After all, the cultures that forbid blood don't say it's an 
abomination in the eyes of G-d (or however you want to put it) but go 
ahead and eat it anyway because not to do so would be wasteful, right?

Blood sausage recipes tend to be long and complicated compared to 
other sausage recipes, and there are many different kinds, ranging 
from those which are really white puddings with just enough blood 
added to make them black when cooked (like those of the UK), to those 
which are largely meat sausages with blood added (like some Polish 
versions), to ones which really are mostly blood with some fat added 
(French and German versions).

No single recipe is a good representation of the gamut, if you see 
what I mean. I just did a Google search for "black pudding recipe" 
(without the quotes) and got over 94,000 hits.

I've eaten black puddings and blood sausages from a variety of 
cultures, ranging from the UK/Irish style (which has, I suspect, 
changed over the years, due to the same problems that have gotten the 
general cuisine of the region somewhat dumped upon, largely unjustly, 
for the past century or so... the best of the English black puds I've 
encountered have been okay, nothing special) to Slavic kishka types 
which contain muscle meat and buckwheat groats and not much blood 
(usually excellent), to various Latin American morcilla versions, 
which are usually a spicy mixture containing meat, fat, onions, rice, 
blood, and, of course, spices, quite similar to a Cajun boudin noir 
(morcilla's one of my faves, and de rigeur at the kind of barbecue 
Ana was telling us about the other day), on through your typical 
French and German versions which are light-textured, mostly blood and 
fat, and extremely rich. Another favorite of mine is the German 
Zungewurst, which is a large, cold-cut bologna-type entity, in which 
diced, cured tongue (pork?) is held together in a substrate of 
black-pudding-type mixture. Sounds awful, no? Put paper-thin slices 
of it on rye bread, with a little good mustard, and perhaps a dark 
beer, it's surprisingly good.

So you can see how difficult it can be to know how to proceed when 
someone asks you for a blood sausage recipe. I mean, I'm assuming you 
won't be making them at home, so this is mostly a moot or academic 
question. I suggest you do web searches for "black pudding recipe", 
"blood pudding recipe", "blood sausage recipe", and who knows, see if 
you get anywhere with "morcilla recipe".

Adamantius