SCANDINAVIA - COOKING BLOOD

You know that warm, bubbly, oozing red stuff that squirts out of the slit throat of an animal while it dies a slow and painful death? Swedes make soups, puddings, and pancakes with it, and it's totally legit. Fair enough that the practice of eating blood is held over from the days of starving peasants having to use every part of their recently-slaughtered animal, but—and running the risk of sounding like a backwards-ass Christian—where I grew up in Sacramento, California, and in most other places, the act of eating blood is looked upon as a total sin. To quote the bible, Genesis 9:3: "Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything. But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it." In other words: it is FUCKING GROSS to pig out on blood.

But Swedes, however, seem to run no risk of spending time in hell for ingesting it. Whenever I say, "Eeeeeeeeew" from seeing the big, bloody boogers they try to pass off as food in the supermarkets, my Swedish friend Kristoffer gets all defensive and starts talking about how blood contains tons of iron and vitamins and that students eat it with noodles because it's so cheap and nutritious. To prove a point, I decided to force him to actually cook the stuff. Like from start to finish, from slitting the throat to digesting it. To which his reaction was (of course), "No no nooo, I can't slit the throat of a living thing!" He did agree to the cowardly Plan B: Buy the blood from people who had the balls to put their action where their mouth is, and cook it according to traditional Swedish recipes.

Blood Pudding ("Blodpudding")
Ingredients: ½ liter of pig blood, 50 g of butter, a beer, 3 ½ dl of flour, 2 tbsp of sugar, ½ tbsp of salt and pepper.

First, we had to get our hands on some blood. Most Swedish butchers have stockpiles of it. You just order it from the man at the counter and he yells to his colleague, "One bucket of blood!"

When you make blood pudding you must start by straining the blood to remove any pieces of flesh floating around in it.

Take it out of the oven, let it cool, and cut the pudding into thin slices, then throw it in the frying pan and fry it up!

The traditional way of eating "blodpudding" is with some lingonberry jam and snaps.

Be careful though, they fry real fast. It's time to flip when the blood starts to bubble.