Figatellu / Figatelli

So I was out buying some French dry sausage to take to a friend in Berlin, and I came across an interesting, dark-coloured sausage that I bought for myself. It’s very dry and yet not all that firm, having a somewhat chunky crumbly texture inside that forces you to slice it rather thickly. And yet the flavor is slightly sweet, slightly tangy, just smoky enough, and full of the sort robust flavor that you usually find in iron-rich red meats. Check out the texture in these pictures I took (including some food-porn closeups):

See? Pretty hot, eh?

As it turns out, the sausage is a Corsican variety called figatelli or figatellu, which (according to this French Wikipedia page and this English blog) is made from a combination of ham, pork liver, and pig’s blood. Yes, you read that right.

Let me be the first to say that I’ve never much liked black pudding (i.e., blood sausage), and I’m not a big fan of liver (with foie gras being my guilty exception), so I know that I probably wouldn’t have bothered trying this one if I had known what was inside it. I saw that the name had “fig” in it, and, knowing that French and Italian share the same root word for the fruit, I assumed that it would be a standard smoked pork sausage with a bit of dried figs interspersed. Ironically, the expectation of dried figs helped me ignore the over-soft texture at first, which I really should’ve recognized immediately as coagulated blood.

So if this hasn’t turned you off entirely already (bravo!), give this a try next time you see it at your local butcher / meat market.