red hot blood: morcilla.

I wrote this piece last winter. Now that the air's getting brisk again, I felt the need to revisit my autumnal blood-sausage adventure of 2010. I've enjoyed several good meals off of this pig since the day of slaughter; thanks to Nora (the pig-raiser), Mary (the butcher), Anna and Tex (the buyers) and to Jess, who was my willing assistant throughout the morcilla-making process. Photo illustrations are my own. More photos from the process online here. Enjoy. -AMH

The thermometer read five degrees in Wallowa the day before Thanksgiving. No amount of wood could warm the ranch house to comfort, and we wore layers of extra clothing under our outerwear. Snow-covered mountains and a silver sky loomed over a crisp white blanket of day-old snow. Seven of us walked across the yard: me, the nursing student, with a butcher, a chef, a cowboy, and our guests. Upon our arrival, the pig looked at us curiously.



While the butcher prepared her pistol and her knife, I looked down at the roasting pan in my own hands and then at the gently snorting animal. Blood was throbbing through the pig’s arteries, dripping through its veins, oxygenating and circulating, bringing perfusion to all of its vascular tissue and around its delicious, fatty bits. I was here to take that blood.

Months earlier, in September, I found out that I would get to watch a pig slaughter. My friends had found buyers for their piglets in springtime and fed them well throughout the summer. As the temperature dropped and fall descended, it was time for this pig to be butchered, and the only part of the pig that didn’t already have a designated use was its blood. I could use the deep, bright red blood, teeming with platelets, fibrins and clotting factor. But how?

“You have to make morcilla,” my mother said when I told her of the slaughter. She had memories of her own mother in Cuba holding the pig between her knees, slitting its throat in one quick movement and then putting fat, meat, spices, hot pepper and blood into intestines that had been rinsed twice and soaked in bitter orange essence, for cleansing, overnight. I looked up morcilla recipes online and started to source some bitter orange sauce,mojo de naranja agria. I had only seen something by that name in the Goya section of the Mexican market, and upon closer inspection the ingredients were all wrong; mostly salt and oil. Not the true bitter orange oil I needed.

I didn’t know how to clean intestines, and I couldn't find the orange oil, so I asked my butcher friend if she could seek out casings and she did. Frozen, packed in saline, the casings were spectacular balloons as we rinsed them clean before the slaughter: cloudy and translucent, expansive and flexible and strong. Just like our bowels.



What else goes into blood sausage? Nearly every culture has its own variation on the theme of blood-filled innards. German blutwurst, British black pudding thickened with oatmeal, French boudin noir. My mother’s experience was of the Spanish morcilla, traditionally filled with rice. Morcilla is defined by its smoked paprika pimenton and nutmeg seasoning. Most types of blood sausages share a combination of meat, fat, blood and grain, rice or bread for fill and texture.

I delved further into the research; few cookbooks featured recipes for blood sausage. I found several recipes online that seemed dependent upon store-bought pigs blood. The main directive I saw on the recipes online was that everything should be cold: cold bowl, cold whisk, cold blood. I assumed this was to prevent coagulation. The same cold that forced us to wear two pairs of wool socks and multiple pairs of pants would keep the blood flowing smoothly into the casings as we made the links of sausaged blood.



I’ve been eating meat for years, on and off, but never seen an animal die; with all of this Michael Pollan and Jonathan Safran Foer and even Moby writing about animals and death and eating, I wanted to watch a slaughter for myself. During my childhood, I had often watched (and smelled) my parents gutting fish. The meat that went into my burger, however, came from the cold, bright displays of the grocery store. In a generation, something had been lost.

Return to the cold day and the warm pig, still breathing, heart still pumping blood. The slaughter began when Mary, the butcher, aimed her handgun and shot neatly through the pig’s head, and deftly ran her knife across its neck. Suddenly, chaos: bright, arterial blood spurting as a one of the buyers, a chef, held the roasting pan under the pig’s neck. The blood sloshed in the pan, leaving the snow colored a cadmium red.  The local cowboy, John, yelled “Hell, Mary, you nearly gutted me with that knife!” as he straddled the dying pig. “Oh, John, I’ve been trying for all these years!” she joked as she assisted to steady the pig’s convulsing body. 



Watching the severe seizing, my nursing school test-taking skills rolled through my head: ABCs first: airway, breathing, circulation, the pig is in shock right now. The pig has a high heart rate, high respiratory rate, low blood pressure. The roasting pan was half full of foamy, sloshing blood. There was more blood loss than the pig’s circulatory system could handle. The pig would die soon. Do pig’s heart rates compare to ours? Faster? I should have been thinking about sausage and here I was imagining the pig as part of a code.



There was no call for CPR, however.  “Get a whisk!” yelled the chef. The blood was clotting; I could see a massive, jello-like block forming in the center of the roasting pan. I ran through crunching snow back to the house, looking for a whisk in the ranch’s old kitchen, while the housebound rancher himself yelled directions at me from the woodfire-heated living room, “Whatcha need?” Breathless, I replied, “A whisk! The blood is clotting… nothing I read referenced this. Is it too cold outside? I don’t understand.” 

The chef’s sister and Jess came up, the bucket of blood in hand, and we knew we need to work fast.  The rancher said, “I reckon you need to keep it at body temperature… 98.6, then it won’t clot one bit.” I set up a double boiler. My mother called me. I tried to answer without getting the sticky blood on the phone’s keypad, an unanticipated struggle. “Amy, I meant to tell you, don’t heat the blood. Whatever you do don’t heat it. Then you’ll cook it before it’s stuffed!"



I ignored all directions and we began by straining the blood using a metal colander, sorting out the huge clots and the little pieces of hay and dirt that had been in the pig’s beard. We mixed the strained, liquid blood in with caramelized onions, crumbled, stale baguette, diced up lard, nutmeg, black pepper and pimenton.

Another interesting twist: we didn’t have a sausage stuffer. With no grinder to chop the bread, lard and onions into very tiny bits and no stuffer to ease the process of filling the fine casings, we used a funnel and the narrow end of a wooden spoon to fill the sausage. We tied off one end of the endless casing, filled the sausage quickly and then twisted off the links afterward.

The rancher, our host, popped his head in part way through the bloody process, and said, “Wow, y’all almost look like you know what you’re doing.” Key word: almost. At one point in the process, the chef’s sister said, “I keep wanting to lick my hands, as if this is batter. And then I keep remembering: this is blood.”

How did they taste, these coagulated, red links? After post-stuffing boil, we hung the sausage to dry off of wooden spoons over a bucket. Two days later, after the cold had lifted and our Thanksgiving feast had been consumed, the morcilla was my breakfast: browned in butter, crisped to delicate blackness on its edges. The morcilla tasted like nutmeg. A slightly over-seasoned, and yet perfectly spreadable soft sausage. Downright indulgent on crisp fresh bread.



From any protein that we find stationary or mobile in an animal’s body, we can make a meal-- even blood! A strange meal, foreign to a palate trained on boneless chicken breast and neatly sliced bacon, but a meal regardless. “It’s different than my grandmother made,” said the rancher. I could only assume that this variation on morcilla was also different the sausage that my grandmother made for my mother on that warm, distant island.

There was a moment during the sausagemaking when, after a lifetime of mostly eating meat, I stood in a kitchen with my hands covered in blood, the counters covered in blood, filling sausage while watching pig hooves and organs coming through the door. I had finally seen a slaughter.



AMH