click me

And German beer? Yum. Last time I went to the Great British Beer Festival I spent most of the afternoon by the little German beer bar. Kinda wrong but hey.

The beer is vegetarian, though. Yum :-)

They fed me a lifetime’s worth of brussel sprouts when I lived in Vienna. But it was all good. I loved the wine, beer, cheese, pastries, eh, so many things.

…ever since, as a kid, I read about the Masai bleeding cattle periodically, rather than killing them. I mean, it’s clearly not vegan. But if you get over the “yuck” factor, it’s an interesting idea. It seems like its not very painful (you know how your scalp can bleed like crazy from even a painless cut). And it is not as resource intensive as meat, and not lethal. Probably at least as trophically efficient as milk and milk products, and possibly more so, because breeding isn’t required.

Granted, modern blood sausage is probably all from slaughter, but a) it needn’t be and b) if you’re going to kill something, using it all up seems like a righteous sort of idea (if that’s the sort of thing you get righteous about). Also, you get a lot of iron and flavor, so 50% or more of the sausage (by weight) can be rice or some other binder, and it still seems like a sort of meat, even with low animal content.

According to this site, bleeding of cattle was also part of Irish farming. (“Selection may even be for animals able to withstand regular bleeding to supply blood for human consumption which was important in the Kerry cattle of Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century and is still important in the herds of cattle belonging to the Masai tribesmen of Kenya.”)

I try to taste blood sausages in various places, and have found some pretty good ones. The Azores have a variant that varies from maker to maker, but (by taste) seems to generally have some white pepper, black pepper and cloves, and maybe something juniper-like. It’s always served grilled, with a side of fresh pineapple. Morcilla is also pretty interesting. Boudin noir? Better (so far) than my experience with English black pudding, though in theory it’s about the same concept. I think it’s the oatmeal (stodgy rather than chewy-gummy when fried).

As for other bits…
brains: yummy but not safe or available in the mad cow / scrapie era. They probably burn them as infectious waste by now.
kidney: too much soaking and blanching if you don’t want to be highly aware of their source. But, again, a little goes a looong way.
sweetbreads: yum.
chitlins: they were properly called shitlings for a reason, before the name was bowdlerized. Lots of hot sauce required.