Transcript for the Piece Audio version of A Taste for Blood (Sausage, that is)

Basque Blood Sausage
Edible Idaho Feature: 1208GH_Sausage.wav Feature 5:12 12/07/09 GH/ed
[HOST INTRO] Tis the season for holiday feasting. But some celebratory foods can be a little hard to swallow. Like blood sausage. Made from the blood of freshly killed animals, it’s not exactly a holiday favorite. So why have people flocked every November for over a half century to the Boise Basque Center . . . to eat blood sausage?
In this installment of Edible Idaho, correspondent Guy Hand bites into the mysterious allure of Basque blood sausage. (5:12 to soc out; dialogue and crowd sounds continues to 6:00; fade at will)
[HOST OUTRO] For more on this story or to listen to past Edible Idaho programs, go to northwest food news dot com.
[SCRIPT]
(Sounds at festival) (Hand) It sits on my plate like some kind of shiny black eel. I mean, I’m a pretty adventurous eater, but this thing looks scary.
(Toni Achabal) That’s why they call them mortzillas. Mortzilla doesn’t sound as bad as blood sausage.
(Hand) That’s Toni Ach-ah-ball. She’s been coming to the Basque Center dinners since they began back in 1949. This, on the other hand, is my first more-see-ah festival. And it feels like everybody at this long communal table is waiting for me to take that fateful bite.
(Crossfade from crowd to digging sounds) (Hand) But first a little backstory.
(Hand) I was relieved to learn more-see-ahs are made of more than blood. They’re also packed with leeks: Today some 5000 leeks are being dug up in this garden near Kuna. Tracy Basterrechea (Bahss-te-rah-chair) is one of a dozen Basque men helping harvest and clean these ivory-colored vegetables on a brisk November afternoon.
(Hand) Are all of the leeks that you use for the festival grown here? (Basterrechea) They’re all grown here at Benito Goitandia’s house; He takes a lot of pride in growing ‘em.
(Hand) Benny, as his friends call him, is the area’s blood sausage patriarch. A 76-year-old former weight lifter, Benny Goy-tan-dia’s broad face beams as the air fills with the scent of leeks.
(Hand) Do you know, is it a really old Basque recipe? (Goitandia) Oh yes, lots a, lots a years. Even before I born. (laughing)
(Hand) Benny figures he started eating more-see-ahs back in the Basque country when he was a baby. (sound of men talking and cutting leeks) And that, I learn, is one of the attributes of blood sausage. Through the pulling, cleaning and washing of leeks, the more-see-ah sparks memories and preserve a little Basque history. Tracy Basterrechea:
(Tracy Basterrechea) It’s fun to sit around and listen to all the old Basqoes from the old country. We sit around and talk and tell stories and speak Euskara, the Basque language. The camaraderie is just great, it’s fun.
(Crossfade to sounds in kitchen) (Helen Berria) The Basques are big on keeping their culture, keeping their language and that’s why we do all this, it is part of the culture . . .
(Hand) Helen Buh-RE-ah and a handful of others are making blood sausage in the basement kitchen of the Basque Center. Sausage patriarch Benny Goy-tan-dia stands near large buckets of ingredients: cooked leeks, onions, parsley — and, of course, shiny crimson-black blood.
(Hand) So there’s no meat in the sausage, just the blood? (Benny) No, no meat. (Hand) So it’s the leeks and the onions and the vegetables and then this is with the blood mixed in? (Benny) Yes. And the rice. We mix the rice now.
(Helen) Then they put it through this process where we actually put them in casing, then the casings are tied into these oh, about four to six mortzillas in each one . . .
(Hand) Do you like them? (Helen) Oh, they’re delicious. They’re wonderful. . . . (Hand) What do they taste like? (Helen) They have their own taste, be hard to describe it (laughing) (Other woman) If you like it they taste good (laughing), if you don’t like it, too bad . . .
(Hand) Phil Sair-ah-sketta says blood sausage tastes better when you know why people began making them in the first place.
(Phil Sarasqueta) Traditionally the way you did it back on the farm is on the first day you start with a live pig and you collect the blood, which is used for the blood sausage. . .
(Hand) And the blood in the sausage, I assume gives it a flavor; does it also give it texture or help hold it together? (Phil) Too a point. Really the reason that all these ingredients are in here is because the Basque are kind of known for being pretty frugal people like a lot of the immigrant people and the joke is they use everything but the squeal.
(Cross fade to sounds at sausage festival) (Toni Achabal) And so they managed to make good recipes out of bad things.
(Hand) Back upstairs at the sausage festival itself, Toni Ach-ah-ball and her daughter Julia stand in line waiting for a plate of more-see-ahs. Julia has been coming to the festival since she was three, but learning to love blood sausage took some time.
(Julia) One of the reasons that I really didn’t like ‘em was because they would bring them home and mom would fry them up and then the whole house stunk so bad I would run up to my room and put clothes at the bottom of the door trying to keep the smell out of my bedroom . . .
(Hand) Stories like that don’t exactly peak my appetite. So when we sit down to finally eat more-see-ahs, I let a blood sausage veteran, Clay Erskine, go first.
(Hand) Are you going to try the sausage? (Clay) Yea, of course.
(Hand) Erskine takes a bite.
(Hand) How is it? (Clay) Very good. (Hand) Can you describe the taste? (Clay) Mmmm. It’s got a really strong flavor of leeks and onions, just really earthy vegetables.
(Hand) Erskine is right. Apart from its creature-from-the-black-lagoon looks, my first more-see-ah is sweet and savory. I can begin to understand why nearly every culture on earth, from Sweden to Vietnam, makes a version.
And for the Basque in southern Idaho, blood not only holds together a celebratory sausage; it binds a people to their past.
(Hand) In Boise, Idaho, I’m Guy Hand.
(Toni) One of the gals told me yesterday that she boils her’s first, so they get heated all the way through and then she puts them in the oven . . .