Skip to main content

Cooking with Blood

Pasta, potatoes and rice may be staples of the Mediterranean, northern Europe and Asia, but there's another, older food that's almost never mentioned in connection with these places: blood.

Before explorers brought potatoes to Europe from North America (that is, a few hundred years ago), people in harsh climates used blood for food: it's nutritious, and the animal doesn't have to be killed. Jennifer McLagan writes in Odd Bits,
In harsh northern climes where food was often scarce, both Scandinavians and the Irish survived on animal blood. The growing antlers of reindeer were a source for Laplanders, while in Ireland they turned blood into a national dish. The French writer Henri Misson de Valbourg wrote about his voyages through England, Scotland and Ireland in the late seventeenth century in Misson's Memoirs and Observations in his Travels over England (1690). In Ireland, he recalled eating 'one of their most delicious dishes' made from blood mixed with milk and butter and flavored with herbs. He was describing drisheen (see p. 222), a blood sausage very popular in County Cork. All over Ireland similar puddings were made: in Tipperary turkey or goose blood was the main ingredient, and in Tyrone and Derry they preserved blood by coagulating and layering it with salt.
All over Europe, McLagan adds, there are variations on the theme of blood sausages; in Italy, they make sweet dishes such as sanguinaccio alla napoletana with blood. In Scandinavia, "they make bread with blood, rye flour, and beer and season it with cloves, allspice and ginger."

Asia has a tradition of using blood for food as well. "In Asia, cooked blood is cut into cubes and sold as a snack or added to soup," writes McLagan. "A well-known Filipino dish, dinuguan (euphemistically called 'chocolate meat'), is a stew of pork and tripe cooked in blood with vinegar and hot peppers." She continues,
Marco Polo describes in detail the ability of Mongol warriors to traverse large distances quickly without being spotted. They didn't stop to make fire and cook their food, because firewood was scarce on the steppes and the smoke from a fire would reveal their location to enemies. Instead each man traveled with eighteen horses and survived by drinking their blood. 
With all this in mind, I've stopped pouring blood down the drain. You can't buy blood off the shelf here in the U.S., but a package of liver typically contains a good deal of blood. Using one of McLagan's suggestions, I substituted some blood and cream for milk in a soup recipe tonight. The blood really was a good thickener--certainly more nutritious than flour and a good substitute for eggs if you're allergic to them. It gave the soup (cream of celery) a hint of a flavor of liver and a reddish brown cast, and I found a bowl of it every bit as filling as a quarter pound of beef.

Source: Odd Bits by Jennifer McLagan, Random House, New York, 2011, pp 216-226.

Comments

tess said…
now, there's an interesting thought.... i knew blood was used "culinarily" (is that a word?) in puddings and such, but if you aren't in charge of your own butchering, i had no idea where people might get it. next time i buy liver, i'll have to collect it.
Lori Miller said…
McLagan says blood will keep in the freezer for three months.

Popular posts from this blog

What $115 Buys--Junk Food vs. Real Food

A lady recently went off about how little food $115 buys, complaining that the pile of (mostly) junk food she bought wouldn't make a week's worth of lunches and snacks for her children. Sad to say, but this looks like what I see in a lot of grocery carts.  Fat pic.twitter.com/qbM23ydaOq — shellshock (@shellshockkk) March 7, 2025 Coincidentally, I paid almost exactly the same amount today on groceries that would make lots of healthy lunches. It's filling food that won't leave you hungry every few hours for snacks. If we want to make America healthy again, this is the way.  

Celebrities Shilling for Big Soda

There's a push in Washington and ten states to ban soda (and other junk food) from SNAP, a program for low-income people to buy groceries. This seems like a no-brainer: the N in SNAP stands for nutrition, and soda doesn't have nutrients. It's liquid sugar, the last thing we need in a country full of diabetics. People can drink water for virtually nothing and save their SNAP money for actual food. Yet a number of posts from otherwise sensible accounts have opposed this.  Reporter Nick Sorter says that a company called Influenceable has been paying influencers to post these opinions. (Click on the link for the full thread.) 🚨🧵 EXPOSED: “INFLUENCEABLE” — The company cutting Big Checks to “influencers” on behalf of Big Soda Over the past 48 hours, several large supposedly MAGA-aligned “influencers” posted almost identical talking points fed to them, convincing you MAHA was out of line for not… pic.twitter.com/PpPwH9lHGe — Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) March 22, 2025 Sorter adds...

$17/pound chips! Real food is cheaper

 My latest video on YouTube: Real food is generally cheaper than junk food--the pictures prove it. I took these at Kroger and from their website in March 2025. Prices are either straight from the tags or calculated based on product weight.  Music: On We Go (ClipChamp)  First photo by AS Photography: https://www.pexels.com/photo/vegetables-stall-868110/

Not Only Cheaper, But Easier

A while back, I wrote about saving money on break time coffee and snacks. I haven't done very well putting it into practice. But a post by James Clear today got me thinking about it again: Warren Buffett uses a two-list system to prioritize things. Check it out --and follow the instructions. Using Buffett's two-list system, two of the goals I ended up with were taking care of myself and saving $400 more per month than I already am. As I said, I've been wanting to save money, and the system made me really focus on this. I came up with 11 money-saving ideas, six of which had to do with food. Buying hamburger in bulk. Ranch Foods Direct sells one-pound packages of 80% lean pastured ground beef in bundles of 20 for a lot less than Whole Foods. Sprouts only carries super-lean beef that's grass-fed, and it's more expensive, too.  Not driving to Whole Foods. Whole Foods is out of my way, and saving a weekly trip saves gas. Coffee at home, tea at work. Tea is fr...

1972: Carole King, M*A*S*H and...Food for 2014?

I feel well enough to try Atkins induction again. The palpitations are gone, even without taking potassium. My energy level is back to normal--no more trucking on the treadmill early in the morning  to burn off nervous energy or emergency meat, cheese and mineral water stops after yoga. It's back to lounging around to Chopin and Debussy in the morning and stopping at the wine bar for pleasure. I'm using the original Atkins book: Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution from 1972. While looking in the book for a way to make gelatin (which is allowed on induction, but Jello(TM) and products like it have questionable ingredients), I felt the earth move under my feet : those recipes from 42 years ago look delicious and they're mostly real food. It makes sense, though: the cooks who wrote the recipes probably didn't have had a palette used to low-fat food full of added sugar or a bag of tricks to make low-fat food edible. Anyone who writes a recipe called "Cottage Cheese and...