Boudin. Is it really just Cajun haggis?

[Tobus]

Ah yes, blood pudding or blood sausage is another type of dish that is common to many cultures. My twin brother has a German wife, and when they were visiting her family in Germany he decided he would order blood sausage (blutwurst) at a restaurant. They all asked him, "are you sure you want to do that?" but he was confident. He had a hard time keeping it down, but had to save face and eat it all anyway - and pretend to like it!

One of the things I meant by calling haggis a crude dish is that it comes from a lifestyle of subsistence farming. While it has become a national dish symbolic of Scottish culture (in large part thanks to Rabbie Burns), it was originally known as something only eaten by poor crofters who had nothing else to eat. All the good parts of the sheep were used elsewhere, for others, and the working families had to subsist on what no one else wanted. So they made the best of it, using up the crude leftovers after butchering a sheep. All they could do was grind up organs and stuff them into the stomach lining along with some grain as filler. Seasoning was very basic with whatever they had from the kailyard. It was not a dish eaten by the upper classes, and was seen as only something the poorest of the poor would eat, just one step above eating garbage. But the Highland Revival in the early 1800s sort of romanticized it along with everything else, and it has since become a prized symbol of the tenacity of Highland culture and their ability to make do with whatever they have.