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Eat Your Blutwurst!
I went to boarding school in Germany for a year. Out of all the horrors I endured there, nothing stands out more than the incident with one particularly gross encased meat product- The Blood Sausage.
Boarding school wasn’t too bad, but naturally there were rules we all had to follow-Lights out at 9pm OR ELSE; brush your teeth for EXACTLY 2 minutes (older kids stood there with a stop watch ready to sound the alarm if anyone stopped ahead of time) and if you spit out any of your toothpaste before the time was up, you had to start over; and absolutely EVERYTHING you put on your plate had to get eaten or you weren’t allowed to leave the table.
It was the last rule that left me sitting at the dinner table for 3 hours one particular night. It was just me. And the blood sausage. Mano-a-wursto.
There it was…flopped onto a plate with nowhere to hide. It only took one tiny nibble to make me realize that the innocent frankfurter actually turned out to be the abomination of the sausage world…a bloody tube of horror! Why did nobody warn me?!! Oh. That’s right. I’m in Germany. Sausages are what dreams are made of here…and should never be feared…even the bloody ones.
Ok, I’ll be honest. It really didn’t taste that bad. But I couldn’t stop thinking that I was basically looking down at a sausage shaped scab. I don’t even PICK at scabs, let alone eat them. Even if they are infused with garlic and spices.
Blood sausage is considered a delicacy, and with a shelf life of 2 days, you know it’s one of the freshest meats you can get.
I could hold out for 2 days. They wouldn’t make me eat spoiled food right?
Thankfully, one of the other kids was kind enough to take it upon himself to eat the blutwurst on my plate, in addition to the 3 others he’d scarfed down earlier. If it weren’t for him, I’d probably still be sitting at that table 20 years later.
If you don’t eat your blutwurst, you can’t have your dessert! Today we’re having a British treat – Black Pudding!
How cruel to name a food Black Pudding. I looked this up once wondering what it would taste like. I just about tossed my cookies when I realized it wasn’t really a dessert at all, but just a deceitful name for blood sausage! >:(
@ Surfie: I know! black pudding is such a tease! I thought it was chocolate or something logical. But i learned not to expect too much when another famous treat from teh country is “spotted dick”.
@Marvin: haha. I guess it was common to be forced to eat everything on your plate. I can understand it if YOU’re the one putting it on there (like i did), but when someone else piles grossness on your plate AND expects you to eat it…thats just too much.
@ JD: blargh. Maybe if its nicely ground up and I dont know what it is, i can handle it. I had liverwurst for YEARS before someone told me what it was. AFter about 3 minutes of gagging, i went back to my liverwurst sandwich, but i wasnt as excited about it.
@ Jen: No such luck. In germany, there is no beating around you bush. you get exactly what you think you’re getting. jawohl!
Wow, you’ve been through the mill, haven’t you! I remember sitting for hours, staring at cold food on a plate, alone at the kitchen table with the wall clock tick…tick…ticking behind me, while my parents vegetated in another room with the TV blasting. Ah, happy childhood memories. Makes me want to stop eating completely. It would h ave been easier if my mother wasn’t the worst cook in the world.
Oh, bleurgh.
I was once confronted by an Irish blood pudding. As Surfie so wisely said above, there is nothing crueler than encasing blood and entrails into a hockey puck shape and calling it pudding.
I was kinda hoping the word ‘blood’ was sorta like the way they use the word ‘cheese’ in head cheese, except the opposite of course. Yuck!