For an Italian dish to fly under the radar is rare in a city that has an insatiable appetite for red sauce restaurants, pizza joints, and trattorias of every stripe. That’s the start of the mystique around sanguinaccio, a seasonal dish that can be either “the sexiest sausage in the world” or a chocolate pudding (spoiler: the chocolate pudding is more popular). Its open secret, however, is evident to anyone who knows Italian, or anything Latinate; sangue is the mother tongue for these dishes’ chief ingredient: blood.

“Traveling butchers would come,” Lidia Bastianich recalls of her Italian childhood. “They’d take this long knife and directly pierce the pig’s heart. My grandmother was ready with a pail to catch the blood. The chops and jowls and belly would turn into bacon or prosciutto or whatever, but the most perishable part was eaten right away. That’s the blood.”