BLOOD ON THE TRACKS

Obviously, once you find a source to buy blood, you’re going to buy blood.  And then you’re going to find something to do with it.  The mind reels at various sacred and profane possibilities but I decided to make blood sausage: black pudding, boudin noir, possibly even morcella.

I looked an online for a good recipe.  This wasn’t as easy as I hoped.  Of course I knew that pork fat is involved, and I had some pork fat in the freezer.  But quite a few of the recipes used a pork shoulder, in which case it sees to me you’re just making a pork sausage with a bit of blood in it.  And I happened to have some Atora beef suet in the cupboard, which may be only borderline legal in the USA.  I also, as it happened to have both pork and beef blood.

Other recipes required large quantities of groats – often barley, and I’m not a huge fan of barley.  I was prepared to use oatmeal but I didn’t want to go further than that.  But I thought having some liver in there might be no bad thing. Pretty much all the recipes, and this did surprise me, involved allspice

As regular readers know I’m constitutionally incapable of following a recipe but I did find this one on recipeland.com.  And yes, I did use beef blood rather than pork. 

I wasn’t absolutely sure what the target audience was – the kind of cook who needs to be told what mincing is, evidently.  And as for a shortage of blood and casing - well, you've just got to try a bit harder.  
 It's described as for “Black Pudding (Irish)” and incidentally it appears on the Facebook page for Irvington Farmers Market, identical but unattributed and it’s lost its Irish designated.  

          
Since I was looking for inspiration rather than precise instructions, I didn’t follow the quantities or the proportions and I definitely didn’t steam for 4 or 5 hours.  I found a rival recipe that suggested 20 minutes – so I followed that instead, obviously.

Came out looking pretty decent.

And even more decent once the sausages had been steamed.   

Do you want a bit of Irish in you?

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And how did they cook up?  And how did they taste?

Well, I was a bit worried that they might burst open during cooking but no, these are obviously strong, though yielding, sausage skins.  They kept their structural integrity very nicely.

And they tasted really remarkably, perhaps surprisingly, authentic; quite rich but quite subtle.  They could have used more salt and certainly more fat, but as a first effort, there was no reason for complaint.

I remember when I used to go out for curries with the lads in Sheffield, one of our number would say after a good meal, “You couldn’t fault it.”  This was high praise indeed, an indication that you certainly would fault it if you possibly could, but try as you might you just couldn’t.  Not sure I, or my sausages, could quite live up to that standard.

BLOODY EATING

I went to see Jim Jarmusch’s vampire movie Only Lovers Left Alive.  Sometimes I worry that I’m not cool enough to watch a Jim Jarmusch movie.  And actually I sometimes think that maybe Jim Jarmusch worries that he’s not cool enough either, otherwise why does he work so hard at it?  Every detail, very accessory has to be so uber-hip you wonder if he’s just disguising some terminal inner squareness, but that’s another story.

Certainly the vampires in the movie are way too cool to do any eating.  They don’t do much drinking either except for blood, which they certainly enjoy a LOT.

Both Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston also get to suck on blood popsicles, which I think is a nice touch.

 Throughout the film I was reminded (and maybe Jarmusch intended it) of another  hip vampire movie; Tony Scott’s The Hunger – (Bowie, Sarandon, Deneuve) and again they’re not hungering after a nice big sandwich. 

But certainly Deneuve let’s some wine pass her lips, in the company of Sarandon; and within the movie it does seem to be wine rather than blood.  Of course things soon get out of hand. 

Sarandon spills wine on herself, dabbing at it does no good, the shirt has to come off – and well, you can guess the rest.

I must say that Tilda Swinton looks as though she never had a square meal in her life, although here she is with a tray of cupcakes. 

Does Jim Jarmusch ever eat?  Seems unlikely, though Neil Young might possibly be handing him some kind of foodstuff here:

Ultimately though, as his pal Tom says: