Mallegato

San Miniato sits on the hills between Pisa and Florence, in the lower Valdarno, and has made mallegato as its winter blood sausage for generations. In the 1990s new European hygiene rules, tightened after the mad-cow years, effectively banned the old practice of catching pig's blood in an open basin at slaughter, and the sausage all but vanished. It was saved when a San Miniato butcher worked with the local slaughterhouse to draw the blood hygienically and directly from the jugular into a closed system, meeting the sanitary law without losing the product; Slow Food then made mallegato a Presidium. The recipe keeps its old sweet-savoury character of lard, pine nuts, raisins and warm spice, and the name records the deliberately loose tie that keeps it whole in the pot.

Softer and sweeter than a plain blood sausage: dark and moist, it slices into rounds flecked with white lard and gold pine nuts and dotted with plump raisins. The flavour runs from savoury, mineral blood to a clear sweetness of dried fruit and pine nut, lifted by nutmeg and cinnamon, with the lard melting to a silky richness. Best just warmed, on bread or with a sharp pickle to cut the sweetness.

Like all blood sausage, mallegato sets when the proteins in the blood coagulate with gentle heat, forming a soft gel that binds the meat, fat and fruit without starch. Here the loose tie is the technical trick: as it boils, the blood filling heats, releases gas and swells, and a tightly filled casing would split, so binding it slackly leaves room for the gel to expand and firm. The diced lard, folded in cold, stays in soft pockets rather than melting away, keeping the sausage moist; the pine nuts and raisins add sweetness, and the raisins' hygroscopic sugars hold water and keep the slice tender. Cooking is kept just below a boil so the blood gel sets smooth rather than weeping and turning grainy at higher heat.