Ah, ’tis the season, the
ha-a-u-u-nting season, when all things dark and Gothic and otherworldly come to
play, as they did in a brilliant production of The Passion of Dracula I saw
last weekend.
Huge bats skimmed the tops of our
heads and crosses ignited in flames at the touch of the infamous Count as he
sought his eternal bride.
I must have been a little bit hungry,
as the sight of all that smacking of lips and drinking of fresh blood made me
wonder…
Not! Excuse me while I get a grip,
for normally you can’t get me in the same room as blood pudding, blood sausage,
black pudding,
boudin noir
,
blutwurst
, or whatever you call the stuff when blood, usually pigs’
or cows’, forms the central ingredient of a fat and meaty sausage or “pudding”
seasoned with herbs and glued together with a bit of oatmeal, barley or the
like.
My husband, on the other hand, is
Eastern European. No, not Transylvanian or Moldavian, but close enough with his
Latvian/Polish bloodlines and his predilection to eat just about anything.
Blood sausage was part of his
upbringing as far back as he can remember. He jokes that he thought if he
brought a pal home from school and word got out that his mom served blood
sausage at lunch he’d be accused of wearing black capes and sleeping in a
coffin — and expelled from school (wishful thinking).
And so stands the great divide
between those who will eat blood and those who will not. Personally, I do admit
to a bit of a contradiction, as I recall enjoying the taste of my own blood as
a kid when I licked a fresh paper cut or small scrape.
But the line in the sawdust on the
butcher’s floor seems to be drawn between WASPs, and pretty much the rest of
the world. I should say Canadian WASPs, for the Brits have long enjoyed black
pudding as part of a traditional breakfast. In fact, the wee puddings have been
elevated to something of a cultural phenomenon, as villages vie for best black
pudding titles, and contestants swing ladies’ pantyhose filled with the stuff.
Then there are the Old World
lifestyles, where getting the most from the farm animal was a given, and
today’s lifestyles, where we package meats in black Styrofoam trays so we see
nary a dribble of blood oozing out from underneath that New York steak.
But besides its nutritious value,
blood can apparently be quite tasty. If you ask someone like my husband, for
instance, what blood sausage is actually like, they rave about it. (Spicy and
like a good sausage, he says, adding, get over it.)
And since the albumin it contains
makes it thicken when it’s heated above 75 C, it has traditionally been used as
a thickening agent in many a classic dish, including one we all enjoy and I ate
more than once in France,
coq au vin
.
In the “olden days”, it was also used to braise meat, especially wild game
dishes.
Czechs and Slovaks also eat blood
sausage, usually served fried. But then they also eat
jiternice
, a sausage made of lungs and liver, and you can likely
hear my other Albertan WASPish repugnance over the thought of eating “pumps and
filters” (organ meats).
Spaniards, Portuguese, Russians,
Swedes, Finns, Koreans, Filipinos, Argentines — they’re all in on eating
blood. Like I said, it’s pretty much us WASPy North Americans who don’t do the
vampirical thing.
Where did it all start, this bloody
sausage business? Who knows for certain. One source puts it in Greece, as
Homer’s
Odyssey
refers to roasting a
stomach stuffed with blood and fat. More likely the making of blood-based
dishes sprang up serendipitously in a hundred locales at once as a natural way
of using all the animal in pre-supermarket times.
All I can say is haunting season or
no, I would be the last one in town to boil up a big kettle of fresh pigs’
blood — ugh — and toss in some oatmeal and herbs or spices. I’ll
leave that to the experts, thank you very much.
In the meantime, I might even close
my eyes and try a piece of that bloody sausage, cooked up well or fried, next
time I cross one, though the Count, bless his black heart, may well have been
onto something by keeping it all freshly flowing.
VAMPIRE EMPIRES
So where did the idea of Count
Dracula and his vampiric world come from?
The idea of the undead harkens back
to ancient Greece, just like the blood sausage itself. But the cult of
vampires, one cultural theorist suggests, may have been linked to incidents of
murder, violence or other acts of ne’er-do-wellishess in Eastern Europe in the
15th and 16th centuries.
If people suspected the culprits were
ghosts, they may have gone to graves and unearthed the coffins of the dearly
departed, like good old Uncle Piotr. With no scientific knowledge of the
process of death, they would have unearthed coffins and beheld Piotr with long
fingernails and long hair, both of which continue to grow after death, and a
pale, white face with bright red lips. Very vampiric.
As for the concept of killing a
vampire by driving a wooden stake through its heart, it would have seemed
reasonable under the circumstances that, in order to prevent Piotr and like-minded
corpses from rising up and wreaking havoc in the community, it would be a good
idea to pin him down and keep him in his place, so to speak, with a big stake
through the heart or otherwise.
The garlic part I’m not sure about,
but maybe it just kept anybody away.
As for the swooning sexualization of
tall, dark, handsome strangers, vampires, like Count Dracula, have long been
acknowledged by cultural theorists as getting good purchase in Victorian
England, when such handsome, elegant “outsiders” from Eastern Europe were
sweeping women off their feet. Someone had to put those romantic interlopers in
their place, and Irish writer Bram (Abraham) Stoker was in the right place at
the write time to do it.
Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning
freelance writer who notes that the Hungarian word
vampir
may have originated from the Turkish word
uber
, meaning witch.