Sanguinaccio: From Mexico, Naples to Brooklyn

Making sanguinaccio with Vincenzina
D'Amato and Elena Loguercio

By Danielle Oteri

There are many laments uttered about the passing of traditions in the Italian American community. 

Nobody does it the old way anymore. Not like we did it. 

All the old ways are gone. Who has time these days? 

And the heaviest, most guilt inducing of all these: Once I die, that’s it.

I appreciate why Italian Americans feel this way. We’ve experienced the slow fadeout of our old neighborhoods, the rise of packaged foods, less time spent with our extended families and a strong lean toward products of convenience. But as a historian, I see transformations instead of endings and a chance to see how traditions are always changing.

The perfect example is sanguinaccio, a rich chocolate and pig’s blood pudding that I’d been told absolutely nobody makes anymore. It can be found at some of New York’s oldest pastry shops like Egidio’s in the Bronx and Rocco’s on Bleecker Street. Friends in Italy told me this disgusting concoction could only be found in remote, rural pockets of Campania, made by very old-fashioned farmers. 

First, Vincenzina and Elena prep the ingredients

I took everyone’s word for it until I received an invitation from my friend Patrick to taste his own homemade sanguinaccio. He had just purchased pasteurized blood from a butcher in Newark, New Jersey who supplies it to Hispanic restaurants that make morcilla, or blood sausage. Patrick reported that he had sent several Italian American friends to Newark as they had plans to resurrect the old sanguinaccio tradition as well.

Surprised that sanguinaccio was resurging among my peers, all born in the 1970s, I looked to social media to see where else it might be alive and well. A quick hashtag search on Instagram, where 90% of its 150 million-person audience is between 18 and 35, revealed 846 recent pictures of sanguinaccio! 

Then, they strain the blood

Sanguinaccio may just be pudding, but it tells an important story about the Southern Italian experience that many Italian Americans no longer know. The myth begins in colonial Mexico with the Aztecs who were noted for a potent drink made of hot spices and cacao all stirred together with the fresh blood of a sacrificed human. Southern Italy was under the crown of Spain when many of Italy’s signature ingredients including tomatoes, corn, and peppers arrived on ships returning from the New World explorations. The story goes that the pig’s blood sanguinaccio is an adaptation of the Aztecs’ famous chocolate drink.

Its appearance during the pre-Lenten season is entirely secular and due to the necessity of Southern Italian farmers to slaughter their pigs in the cool, more sanitary late winter air. Neighbors from around the countryside would be asked to help and invited to feast on every piece of the pig that could not be preserved. The first product was always the sanguinaccio, which utilized blood from the pig’s freshly slit throat. With chocolate and milk, it would be carefully transformed into a silky pudding.

Next, the chocolate is melted with milk

The photos on Instagram hashtagged with sanguinaccio revealed everything from a fancy, jarred version made in an elegant Naples pasticceria to an image of a sullen pink hog, about to meet her fate. Nearly all the pictures showed the fried ribbons of dough called chiacchierre that are dipped in the pudding.

Mario Batali developed a blood-less version of sanguinaccio and after seeing all the chocolate used in the traditional recipe used by Elena Loguercio, a native of Sassano in the Cilento, I wondered if the blood was really necessary. The consensus among those I asked was that the blood added a certain depth and intensity to the pudding that was matchless. And so, a 400 year tradition born in Mexico continues. It’s now been traded across the Atlantic twice, adapted, lost and reborn.

Espresso is added to the mixture

Elena Loguercio’s Sanguenacc’ from Sassano

1 liter of pasteurized blood

3 liters of regular milk

3 k of chocolate

1 kg sugar

1 pack of Perugina cacao

1/2 kg flour

1/2 kg granulated cookies

12 cups espresso

1 stick of butter

2 squeezed oranges, juice

1 cup of Sambuca

Melt chocolate with milk and let it cool off for 10 minutes. Turn off the heat. Add blood to the pot, add the melted chocolate, slowly stir in dry ingredients and then the espresso. Turn the flame on to medium and stir all the ingredients in the pot in a consistent clockwise motion until it hardens, which takes about an hour. When it starts to feel like a soft pudding add the orange juice and Sambuca and keep stirring until the pudding has a firm texture. 

Finally, stir until the pudding is thick

Photos courtesy of Marilena D'Amato

Danielle Oteri is an art historian, writer, speaker and founder of Feast on History. (feastonhistory.com)