This recipe calls for blood ...

My friend and colleague Zoe Sadokierski and I are currently working on our second project together.

See here for Zoe’s blog and examples of her amazing work.
http://zoefolio.blogspot.com/

Zoe and I collaborated on a contribution for a collection called Hair, part of the Trunk series edited by Suzanne Boccalatte and Meredith Jones.
http://www.boccalatte.com/?p=345

I wrote about my wild and unkempt hair, that I don’t have serious, newsreader hair and hence certain assumptions are made about me. I have posted Zoe’s fabulous illustrations for that piece.

Our second collaboration will be submitted for inclusion in Trunk’s second volume entitled Blood and will look at the question of blood – human and animal – in cooking.

I have been researching the history of blood in food, everything from ancient Sumerian recipes with human blood to Italian sweet blood and chocolate sausages and Polish duck blood’s soup. Zoe is thinking up magical ways to present the text, using some editions from my obscure cook book collection as inspiration.

Here are some quirky facts on blood taken from Stewart Lee Allen’s, In The Devil’s Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food.

Malaysians have been known to suck the blood from a freshly decapitated rattlesnake … apparently it is a natural aphrodisiac.

Haiti’s 1804 slave revolution began with a voodoo ceremony that climaxed in the drinking of a pig’s blood.

Members of Kenya’s Masai tribe are known to drink the milk and blood of cows mixed together.

I need to fact-check the first two but I have seen a documentary on the Masai that showed the process of taking blood from a live cow for drinking purposes.