Since I tend to bring food to work that no one else has heard of (how do people not know what hummus is??), my coworkers have responded with an obsession with feeding me to all of the region's traditional foods. Tonight one brought homemade Boudin. For anyone not familiar, it's basically a sausage of dirty rice, pork, sometimes liver, sometimes blood, and lots and lots of spices in hog casing. Much like gumbo and jambalaya, everyone seems to have their own recipe, though the ingredients tend to stay roughly the same, just in different portions.
Boudin is very spicy...but fortunately not in the "omgburnyourlipsoff" way (unlike boils down here can be). It also tends to be a little more loose and grainy than I'm accustomed to from sausage-type foods, but not in a bad way. From a traditional food standpoint, it makes sense--it's incredibly filling, stores well, can be cooked a few ways, and lets a relatively small amount of meat be stretched out to feed a number of people.
Boudin comes in two forms--Boudin Blanc ("white", or bloodless) and Boudin Rouge (made with blood, traditionally pigs'). Due to legal regulations over health concerns with pigs' blood in the US, the Rouge version is becoming less and less common, with blood being increasingly difficult to get as an ingredient. Here, locals with access to pig slaughtering are still known to make it for personal consumption. Sometimes, beef blood will be used as a legal substitute, but even that is not always readily available as people move away from going to community butchers in favor mass grocery stores. The same situation applies for any recipe made with blood, from all of the blood sausages traditional around the world to blodpudding to blood soups, which spawns interesting discourse about food taboos all of its own.
As far as the Boudin my coworker brought, I was impressed...and ended up writing up and printing off a recipe for blood pancakes for them to try making at home.
