Without Blood Sausage, It Just Wouldn’t Be Christmas
Evan Sung for The New York Times
Mikaela Springsteen had a hand in the making of blood sausage at the New York Estonian House. More Photos »
By JULIA MOSKIN
Published: December 14, 2010
“WE Estonians believe all kinds of things,” said Ell Tabur, a beaming blonde, her arms plunged to the elbow in a tub of barley, onions, blood and marjoram. Ms. Tabur was among about 30 Estonian-Americans who gathered on a recent Saturday to make traditional blood sausage for Christmas Eve at the New York Estonian House (Eesti Maja), a cozy town house near the mouth of the Midtown Tunnel.
Multimedia
Related Recipe
Roosamanna (Cranberry Fluff)(December 15, 2010)
Ms. Tabur, who came to the United States as a baby in 1949, had been waxing lyrical about the Estonian love of meat, especially the onion-laced patties called hakklihakotletid, or more familiarly, kotlet.
“We believe that the Germans copied our hamburger, the Russians copied our piroshki and the Finns stole our sauna and went international with it,” she said.
But despite this litany of loss, all were cheerful during the long, gory hours stuffing verivorstid (blood sausage) mixture into casings. They switched effortlessly between English and Estonian, a language that many had learned in the house as children.
Siim Vanaselja, who was in charge of blood-sausage operations, said that in traditional Estonian village life, verivorstid were made immediately after the slaughter each autumn, when the weather turned cold and the cost of keeping animals warm and fed became too high. Bacon, ham and smoked sausages were laid down for the winter, but blood is highly perishable and must be cooked right away. So the fresh blood sausage was boiled, frozen and saved as a treat for Christmas Eve.
Before Mass, a group sauna was traditional; after Mass, families still sit down to a feast of sauerkraut simmered with fresh pork, roasted potatoes and blood sausages, always sparked with a tangy compote of cranberries or lingonberries. For Christmas dessert, thin crunchy gingersnaps (piparkook) might be paired with roosamanna, a soft pink fluff made by furiously whipping cranberry juice and farina with sugar, which transforms the mixture into an Adrià-worthy foam. “In the old days, kids would just whip the heck out of it, but I have always made it in my KitchenAid,” said Karin Annus Karner, the author of “Estonian Tastes and Traditions,” who is a producer at Reuters in New York. She is also a former principal of the language school at Estonian House.
This was the third time the Estonian community had gathered to make blood sausage, and there were still kinks to be worked out: Mr. Vanaselja ran short on blood and had to send his younger sister across town to Esposito’s, an Italian butcher shop that stocks Agriculture Department-certified beef blood. “We have never gone without verivorstid,” Herb Runne said. “There have always been old Estonian ladies to make it for us.” But now, he said, the community is concerned that the tradition will be lost if younger people do not learn to do it for themselves.
So all watched solemnly as Mr. Vanaselja tossed the onions and cooked barley, added allspice and marjoram (a typical Estonian herb, he said, because it grows everywhere), and poured in blood until the mixture was moist and glistening dark red like cranberry sauce. The casings, tied at one end with string, were rolled onto the ends of large plastic funnels. The mixture was prodded through until the casings were stretched into sausages about the size of kielbasa. The sausages were tied off into rings, to be boiled until firm; every participant would get two to take home.
The workers sometimes broke into rhythmic songs associated with tasks like weaving, harvesting and planting. “Estonian love songs are not between men and women but between people and the land,” said Ms. Tabur, a trained singer.
Estonian food is a recognizably cold-weather cuisine, Nordic in its dedication to the open-faced sandwich and remarkable for its resourcefulness with cabbage, potatoes, tart berries like cranberries and lingonberries, fish, bread and root vegetables. The house’s Girl Scout troop had just made some pickled pumpkin (korvitsasalat), which went nicely with the cooked sausage filling: loamy brown, scented with allspice and full of toothsome barley.
Estonia is the smallest of the Baltic states (the others being Latvia and Lithuania), and the most northern. Linguistically, Estonian is related to Finnish, but it is challenging for pretty much everyone else. “I have tried for years just to teach my dad the word for ‘dinner’ — it’s a pretty short word — and he still can’t say it,” said Mikaela Springsteen, 14, whose mother is Estonian-American. (For the record, the word is ohtusook, with three vowel sounds that are almost indistinguishable for non-Estonians.)
On Jan. 1, Estonia becomes a member of the European Monetary Union, although some at the house questioned whether the 1.3 million Estonians will again bear the burdens of powerful neighbors like Russia and Germany, who have often been Estonia’s occupiers. The biggest wave of immigration took place after the Soviet annexation of Estonia in 1940, and many of those present were first- or second-generation immigrants.
Blood sausages and blood puddings are traditions in almost every meat-eating culture: examples include Spanish morcilla, French boudin noir and Irish black pudding. But in American kitchens, blood is the final frontier of the nose-to-tail movement.
“It’s 7 percent of the animal down the drain,” said Brad Farmerie, who has taught blood sausage workshops to fellow chefs in New York. He learned the craft during his eight years in England, where the principle of using everything edible is firmly in place.
Here, even among those who cure sausages and cut up carcasses, he said, blood is still considered unappetizing and odd. “That’s why I try so hard to make it delicious,” he said. At his restaurant Public in NoLIta, there is Irish black pudding with maple-roasted apples for brunch; and at Double Crown on the Bowery, where the menu is based on British colonies in Asia, he serves a more elaborate Taiwanese dish. “It translates as pigs’-blood Popsicles,” he said, “and each one is a fried, spicy, tasty morsel of delight.” Pork blood (his favorite, though he has also cooked with venison, beef and rabbit) is mixed with sticky rice, sliced, fried, then coated in chili jam and rolled in chopped peanuts and cilantro. In workshops, Mr. Farmerie said, he teaches that blood has a similar protein structure to egg white (which quickly turns rubbery at high heat) and must be treated delicately.
At the Estonian House, where the sausages were boiled and then roasted at high temperature under a blanket of bacon, there were no such refinements.
Since 1947, this house has been an all-purpose base for the Estonian-American community in the United States — complete with a bar, open on weekends, that serves brown, malty Saku beer from Estonia. “I practically grew up in this building,” said Toomas Sorra, a gastroenterologist in Brooklyn Heights who was manning the bar (he is the group’s president). A few caterers also use the house as a distribution point for the tastes of home: rosolje, potato salad pink with beets; kringels, sweet Christmas breads shaped into pretzels; and moist, earthy Estonian sourdough loaves so dense that each one weighs more than three pounds.
According to Ms. Karner, the Estonian language is particularly rich in proverbs related to food: “young maidens and white bread age quickly,” “better a goat that can give milk than a cow who cannot” and, most pithily, “meat unites, cabbage divides.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 15, 2010
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Estonia would become a member of the European Union on Jan. 1. Estonia is already a member of the European Union, and is joining the European Monetary Union on Jan. 1.
No comments:
Post a Comment