Sheep blood sausage

Sheep blood sausage

　　  Sheep blood sausage is a specialty dish from Lhasa, Tibet. The sheep’s blood, scooped from the cavity into a basin, usually fills its own intestines just right. When making the sausage, the clotted blood is first crumbled by hand, then mixed with buckwheat or wheat flour, along with chopped omasum, oil, salt, seasonings, chopped scallions, garlic, and other ingredients. It is then stuffed back into the intestinal casing through the incision. It should not be too full or too flat. A small intestine can be two or three zhang long (approximately 6.6–10 meters); for easier cooking, it can be cut into four or five sections without removing the outer fatty layer attached to the intestinal wall. This fat helps hold the intestines together, so care must be taken during stuffing to keep the intestines straight and prevent tangling. Once cooked, they come out coiled just as they naturally were inside the body. During the lambing season, when there is an abundance of intestines and stomachs and not enough time to eat them all, the stuffed casings are divided into four or five portions and frozen, to be cooked the following year around the Qingming Festival.

　　  Mongolian people typically fill the large intestine with sheep blood plasma to make blood sausage. For eating, it is generally boiled in meat broth for 10–15 minutes. Mongolians and some Westerners also consume fresh animal blood directly. Marco Polo’s Travels describes: “In times of urgency, there were special couriers who could ride nonstop for ten days and nights without lighting a fire or taking a meal, sustaining themselves solely on horse blood. They would sever a blood vessel from their mount and suck the horse’s blood to stave off hunger.” From a medical perspective, blood offers benefits such as high palatability. But apart from emergencies, people do not often drink fresh blood. Another type of blood sausage includes thin layers of meat and liver, mixed with scallions, oil, salt, and other seasonings, and is boiled for half an hour before being eaten. This is also called blood sausage.