Papas de Sarrabulho: Portuguese Blood Porridge
Portuguese has a colloquial word for a mess, a muddle and a day that went wrong: sarrabulho. In the north of the country they serve the same word for lunch.
Papas de sarrabulho is a thick pig-slaughter porridge of pork blood, two kinds of meat, cured sausage and bread or cornmeal - a winter dish from the northern end of Portuguese cooking. Which came first, the dish or the mess, the dictionaries won't say; they frankly admit the origin of the word is obscure. But anyone who has seen everything that ends up in that pot needs no further explanation.
The Porridge from the Minho and Its Relatives
The porridge is at home in the Minho in the northwest and in the belt of towns running from Braga to Porto; it never really made it down south, so this is a dish of the north, not of Portugal as a whole. Its closest relative lives in Ponte de Lima: arroz de sarrabulho, the rice version of the same idea - and the only member of the family with a European Traditional Speciality Guaranteed certificate, awarded in 2023, and a January festival of its own. The thicker, darker papas has neither the stamp nor the festival; inheritance is simply unfair, in porridge families as in any other. The same principle - blood plus a thickener - is known everywhere in Europe where pigs are slaughtered: in the Galician corner of Spain they fry pancakes of pig's blood called filloas de sangue, and in southwestern France they bake poultry blood into a flat cake, the sanguette. But only the Portuguese north turns it into porridge.
From Famine to a Cookbook for the Poor
Legend puts the birth of the porridge in the 14th century, in the famine that followed the plague: the poor supposedly thickened with bread the pig's blood their better-off neighbors handed them at slaughter time. No source backs it up, and recipe sites keep passing the story on anyway. The documented trail is soberer: the lexicographer Raphael Bluteau described sarrabulho as a dish made of pig's blood as early as the start of the 18th century, and the first printed recipe appeared in 1901 in the Portuguese cookbook O Cozinheiro dos Pobres, literally The Poor Man's Cook. Even these dates, though, get copied from one source to the next - the porridge of the poor never found an archivist of its own.
Blood, Cumin and Lemon
The recipe changes from village to village - here bread thickens the porridge, there cornmeal - but the base holds: pork and chicken, cured sausage, in some places offal, and the pig's blood that gives the dish both its color and its name. Blood soup gets cooked at slaughter time back home too; in the corner of eastern Moravia I come from it goes by the name prdelačka - the name comes, politely put, from a rude word for backside - and nobody back home so much as blushes over it. You tell the difference by smell: where a Czech pig slaughter smells of marjoram, the north of Portugal reaches for cumin. It goes in at the very end of cooking, because its strength builds in the pot, and it usually has a lemon at its side to cut through the fat. It's no local invention: cumin sailed into Portuguese pots on the ships that carried spices from India to Europe.
The porridge belongs to winter and to the matança do porco, the family pig slaughter that uses up everything on the animal that can't be cured or smoked. In Braga they ladle it into a bowl like soup; elsewhere it comes to the table as a side for rojões, fried cubes of pork. You wash it down with red vinho verde - up here even the wine is red, whatever its name says about green. Your best chance of finding it is to come in winter, in slaughter season; the traditional eateries in Porto, though, cook it all year round.
Two Euros at Casa Guedes
My portion of papas de sarrabulho came from Porto, from Casa Guedes on Praça dos Poveiros (see Where to Eat in Porto) - people go there above all for the famous roast pork sandwich, and next to it the papas is an unassuming, homey item on the menu. The porridge arrived a dark brownish red, so thick the spoon stopped dead in it, with a thin layer of crushed cumin on top. The blood led the way, dark and iron-rich; the cumin pulled it further east than the Portuguese north reaches, and the sausage left a salty signature. The portion came to roughly 2 EUR. You'll run into papas de sarrabulho in Porto far more often than I manage to run into a bowl of blood soup in Zlín or Vsetín.
