Boudin Noir Presenting my mum and dad’s specialty! They own a butcher’s shop and produce a wide range of traditional meat products, one of them being the famous blood sausage. It’s known all over the world, especially in Europe: in France they call it boudin noir, in Germany it’s Blutwurst, in the U.K. and Ireland you can have black pudding for breakfast… Its origins lie in traditional slaughter, utilizing every single part of the animal and certainly not wasting its very nutritious (lots of proteins, minerals and vitamins) but perishable blood.

What’s really astonishing is the vast variety of recipes for making blood sausage. It seems every country, every little region has its own traditional recipe. The basic recipe for blood sausage uses only blood, seasoning and a filler. Most often pig’s blood is used. Bread, barley, rice, oatmeal, buckwheat or even sweet potato can serve as a filler. In Western Europe the seasoning is rather limited, but in both Southern and Eastern Europe some very typical spices are used, e.g. in Hungary I once tasted a delicious little sausage made with blood, rice and lots of sweet paprika powder. Sometimes even ingredients like raisins, onions or pine nuts are added.

My dad’s recipe is fairly simple. The recipe was passed on by his grandparents, so it really has been in the family for quite some time now. It contains fresh pig’s blood, cooked pork and rind, stale bread and some spices. The cooked meat is minced and then mixed with the other ingredients into a dough. The natural sausage casings (outer lining of the pigs intestines) are stuffed with this dough and finally the sausages are slowly cooked at low heat.

In Belgium and France, the traditional way of eating blood sausages is gently browned in butter and served with applesauce. Instead of using applesauce, my mum serves them with baked apples. She cores the apples and cuts them in half, bakes them in a pan with some lard and finally adds a few tablespoons of brown sugar and a cup of coffee, creating a sweet caramel sauce. It’s the balance between the mineral flavour of the sausage (because of the blood’s high iron content) and the sweet and sour taste of the apples that makes this dish so great.

Although by many regarded as a rather dull and old fashion product, the blood sausage is making its comeback in Belgian cuisine, e.g. I ate it once in a Michelin star restaurant where it accompanied a fillet of rabbit and a well seasoned pumpkin mash. Heavenly! The sweet and sour of the pumpkin worked perfectly with the sausage and the blood sausage in its turn gave the rabbit a little taste of the wild. A part of our culinary heritage restored! Bon appétit to you all!