Right...Right...You're Bloody Well Right

You won't get this pancake dish at Perkins or IHOP!

...and I thought my old, German grandmother was just, well, sick when she brought out the cooked chicken feet; no,not chicken legs as in drumsticks, but the skinny part with the toes still on! Turns out that was just the beginning of my gustatory dilemma that was to recur for two weeks every summer as my parents shipped me out to the farm as slave labor (it seemed) and to remind me how good cornbread was!
Grandma ate every part of every animal on the farm. When I found out what tripe was, I was mortified to see her eat with relish (no, not pickles...gusto). Then, she brought out the blood sausage, and I was ready to take the next bus home. I would have too, except for a couple of minor details:
1. The bus didn't run in Piqua, Kansas (pop.45) and
2. I didn't have any money for the fare. I mean, it's not like my cruel uncles ever paid me for picking cockleburs and hauling corn in by hand. As I recall, they mostly laughed at me while I slaved away.
Anyway, the blood sausage was just too much. I vowed that those words in tandem would never again cross my mind or my lips...and they have not... until now.
It seems back in April, I blogged about the Japanese fascination with blood types which supposedly could identify key personality traits and determine what kind of person one is. They are so obsessed with it there that politicians even declaim their blood types in order to win the voters' favor. Seriously. And baseball players list blood type on their trading cards as well.
I was willing to leave it at that: an interesting story about the importance of blood in societal norms. Then, along came Cate Newton and her website: phlebotomist.net (look for the link at the end).
Cate is seriously obsessed with this blood thing, and I have to admit that I found the site really interesting even though my stomach returned to its childhood roots when I began reading the recipes found worldwide that used blood as a major ingredient. Yes...blood...seriously.
The more educational parts of the blog deal with determining blood alcohol content (handy information after a Bloody Mary), additional information concerning the Japanese mania for blood typing, and fascinating stories about which famous people may or may not have been hemophiliacs. Sadly, nothing about vampires that I could find after a cursory look...not even a bit about the Blood Countess of Russia who reportedly bathed in the blood of virgins to stay young-looking.
But, it was the recipes that held my attention: recipes from around the world. Some of them I had known about, like the Masai tribe in Africa that mixes cow's blood with milk (not so strange; after all, the Mongols used to bleed their horses when they ran out of food)

Recipes provided include those for

blood sausage (also called blood pudding...can you see Bill Cosby promoting this in a "pudding pop"?

blood soup (also called black soup for the squeamish or gullible)

blood tofu and the traditional Finnish dish known as

blood pancakes (pictured above) which call for reindeer blood as an ingredient...go figure.

So, if you are fascinated by the subject, be you vampire or blood countess wannabe, check it all out at

http://phlebotomist.net/

BTW...my blood type is A+ and I grew to LOVE cornbread.