Sundae (Blood Sausage with Glass Noodles)

Variations

• Chapssal sundae: filled with glutinous rice instead of glass noodles. Closer to the older form and much heavier. Rice takes up far more water, so fill it even less — six-tenths is safe.
• Abai sundae: the Hamgyong style, stuffed into the large intestine so each link is far thicker. It survives around Sokcho, where northern refugees settled. Being thick, it takes roughly twice as long to steam.
• Ojingeo sundae: on the east coast the filling goes into a squid body instead of a casing. Squid shrinks with heat, so overfilling bursts it here too.
• Baek sundae: white sundae, made without blood. With no binder the filling breaks up easily, which is why it is usually stir-fried on a griddle with vegetables rather than sliced.
• Sundae-guk: sundae and head meat in a long-simmered pork bone broth — the same family of broth as seolleongtang.
• Against mititei: a Romanian sausage with no casing at all, shaped by hand and grilled. That one relies on the meat's own tackiness to hold together; here the blood does that job.
• Against budae jjigae and currywurst: there the sausage is something you buy. Three pages here fill a casing themselves — this one, weisswurst and haggis — and each is held together by something different: blood, salt-drawn muscle protein, and oatmeal that swells and stays discrete.
• Against jokbal and suyuk: three pork dishes that are all boiled or steamed, cooled, and then sliced — and all three are ruined by slicing them hot.

Tips

• Cleaning the casing is half the work. Scrubbing with flour and coarse salt is not folklore: the flour binds to the mucus and comes away with it, and an intestine rinsed only in water smells completely different. Turning it inside out and doing the other side matters.
• The blood is a binder, not a flavouring. Its proteins coagulate with heat much as egg does, and that is what grips the noodles and vegetables. Once you know that, it also explains why baek sundae falls apart and why it is served stir-fried instead of sliced.
• Strain the blood. Clots left in set into dense pockets while the rest stays loose.
• Wringing the vegetables out is what stops bursts. The water in blanched sprouts and cabbage has nowhere to go; in the steamer it boils and pushes the casing apart. Squeeze once more after you think you are done.
• Fill to seven-tenths. This is the most common failure. The noodles need room to swell into. The link should feel soft when pressed — if it is taut it is already overfilled (wrapping and sealing).
• Steam five minutes, then prick. Wait until the surface has set, or the filling leaks straight back out of the holes.
• Keep the steam gentle. A furious boil tears the casing before the filling has cooked. Steam escaping steadily around the lid is plenty (steaming).
• Clear juice is the signal. It is more reliable than the clock; thickness and fill level can change the time by ten minutes or more.
• Cool it completely before slicing. Hot sundae collapses on the board however well it was made. Slice it cold and re-warm the slices in steam — a microwave turns the casing rubbery.
• Make a lot and freeze it. Steam, cool, freeze the links whole, and steam them again from frozen. This was food made in quantity for feast days and kimchi season.