Sanguinaccio dolce

The sanguinaccio dolce is probably the only preparation in the world, within the great European charcuterie tradition, in which pig’s blood enters a recipe belonging to the register of sweet desserts. Chocolate, combined with blood, in a sausage stuffed into hog casing, has no equivalent anywhere else.

The product is documented in southern Italy, with centres in Campania (where Naples is the home of the best-known version), in Basilicata, in Calabria (the sangiari variant of the Sibari area, with added cocoa powder), in Apulia (a sweet callume, attested at banquets of the seventeenth century), in the Marches, in Umbria (under the dialect name meaccio), and in Abruzzo.

Like the sanguinaccio salato, whose neighbouring entry traces the liturgical calendar, the sanguinaccio dolce is prepared during the winter slaughter, around Sant’Antonio Abate (17 January). But it then belongs to a ritual season of its own: it is eaten from giovedì grasso to martedì grasso, the days that close Carnival, on the eve of Lent. The product is thus a food of transition between the meaty abundance of the year’s beginning and the austerity of Lent, a register that sugar and chocolate, festive commodities par excellence, accentuate further.

The introduction of chocolate into the recipe postdates the original version. Pig’s blood and sweet spices (cinnamon, clove) form the medieval core, rooted in Italian cooking, where the frontier between savoury and sweet was more porous than it is today. Chocolate reached Europe only after the Spanish conquest of Mexico and entered Italian kitchens only in the seventeenth century. Its presence in southern recipes is part of the broader context of Spanish rule, which extended over the Kingdom of Naples from 1503 to 1707. The contemporary form is thus the result of five centuries of sedimentation: a spiced medieval core, onto which sugar and then post-Columbian chocolate were successively grafted.

The Italian health prohibition of 1992 on the retail sale of fresh pig’s blood, mentioned in the neighbouring entry, transformed the status of this product more radically than any other. The commercial version was reformulated without blood: today, the sanguinaccio dolce sold in shops and prepared in the great majority of family kitchens is a chocolate cream (cocoa, milk and spices) that keeps the name and the calendar function (Carnival) of the original product but has lost its nominal ingredient. The bloodless sanguinaccio has become an accepted category of Neapolitan pastry, which constitutes a linguistic singularity: the word still designates a product it no longer literally describes. The original version with fresh blood survives in strictly domestic production, where slaughter still takes place in short circuits, and is the object of conservation work by Slow Food and several food ethnographers, among them Massimo Montanari (see Further reading).