For much of the Christian era, human blood was thought either to contain the soul, or to be the link between body and soul. Both human and animal blood have been drunk across history for a surprising number of reasons. And, from the Renaissance to the present day, human blood has been the site of some bizarre fantasies, from anti-semitic Blood Libels to QAnon theories.

Top 10 Bizarre Uses Of Blood

10 Satanists in the French Court

Paris, 1676. A naked woman is lying on her back on a mattress. A cross and chalice, placed on her belly, rise and fall just perceptibly with her breathing. From the shadows, a repulsive-looking priest appears, holding a baby. A blade flashes in the wavering candlelight; a cry; then silence. Blood flows from the infant’s throat into the chalice, which wobbles faintly. The woman trembles as drops spatter her breasts and throat. Later, the priest removes the baby’s entrails. They are given to a sorcerer named Catherine Montvoisin, who will presently distil them for her own uses. The blood is poured into a phial, and taken away by the woman who had acted as the living altar.

Did this really happen? Many Parisians of the day believed that it did; and that the woman lying beneath that blood sacrifice was no less a person than Madame de Montespan, sometime lover of Louis XIV, and mother to six of his illegitimate children. Rumours ran that Montespan, fallen from the King’s favour, was using rites such as this to win back his love; and also, interestingly, feeding him potions containing her own menstrual blood. These details were just part of a larger court panic in France, which became known as The Affair of the Poisons.

9 Doctor Faustus

The terror inspired by Christopher Marlowe’s play was beyond all description. Elizabethan and Jacobean spectators watching Faustus sign away his soul to Mephistopheles suffered wild nightmares, and in one case sparked a hysterical rush from the playing space, in the belief that an extra, unscripted devil had appeared onstage. Notoriously, Faustus signs the fatal contract in his own blood. Midway through, the blood congeals. Mephistopheles resourcefully fetches a small dish of hot coals, so as to liquefy the blood, and the signature is completed.

For many viewers, the horror of those moments stretched clean down into hell. Because of the status of blood as vehicle of the soul, Faustus was using his soul to sign away his soul. When the blood congeals, part of his soul is resisting this attempt. By responding with a simple physical solution, Mephistopheles employs science to defeat conscience, religion and the soul.

8 Slaughterhouses

“Fancy the richest cream, warm, with a tart sweetness … sweeter than any concoction of the chemist, the confectioner, the winemaker, the very elixir of life itself … No other earthly draught can rival such crimson cream”. The American journalist who penned these words in 1875 had just drunk a glass of animal blood at a slaughterhouse in Cincinnati. Many agreed with him. In that same decade, at the slaughterhouse of La Villette in Paris, ‘every morning between the hours of eight and nine, from a hundred to a hundred and fifty invalids … present themselves to claim their matutinal glass of blood’. Many of these patients were women, for whom actual meat was probably a rarity, with this habitually going to the husbands of poorer households.

Over in New York, women again seemed to be the main recipients of this blood therapy. But, as in the Twilight novels, there could at times be an uneasy slippage between human and animal blood. One very sick young woman graduated from animal blood to that of her husband until, weakened by the practice, he discontinued it. Interestingly, her health now relapsed, confining her to her bed. Another woman who had been using animal blood as medicine was one day confronted by the sight of her husband bleeding severely from a wound to his hand. Their landlady presently walked in to find the wife bewailing her husband’s plight, even as she gulped avidly from the severed vein.

7 The Vampire Sect of Kansas

In Kansas in the late 1880s ‘a man named Silas Wilcox went about the country preaching the doctrine of doing good for the sick’. He soon had enough followers to form a band called The Samaritans. When Wilcox began to ‘openly advocate the drinking of blood for all diseases’, because ‘the bible taught that blood was the life’, The Samaritans initially went to meat packing houses to drink the blood of cattle. But one day finding himself too sick to leave home, Wilcox persuaded Nancy, a fellow Samaritan, to let him drink her blood from her arm. A miraculous recovery followed, and thus the Samaritans became a fellowship of Good Christian Vampires.

Hearing of this, a Kansas man named John Wrinkle began, on falling sick, to drink the blood of his daughter Minnie, 13, and 11 year old son John. A tip-off from a neighbour brought official John Marran into the home, where Wrinkle initially denied the charges. Unnerved by the children’s emaciated condition, Marran inspected their arms, and found them badly scarred around the elbows. Although Wrinkle now caved in, admitting his vampirism, he still insisted that ‘the children had willingly given their blood to restore his health’.

6 Blood and Mourning Rituals

In 1577, the poet Edmund Spenser watched the Irish rebel, Murrogh O’Brien, hung, drawn and quartered at Limerick. And he also saw ‘an old woman which was his foster mother take up his head while he was quartered and sucked up all the blood running thereout, saying that the earth was not worthy to drink it, and therewith also steeped her face, and breast … crying and shrieking out most terrible’.

During the Tithe Wars of the 1830s one General Barry and others went to a Widow Ryan’s house in Rathcormac to demand the tithe. When her son ‘came out of the house to remonstrate with them … he was instantly shot dead at his mother’s feet’. During this dispute, British forces ultimately killed twelve and wounded 42 of the Irish. In the midst of this slaughter a widow, going out to look for her missing sons, ‘met their dead bodies coming home in a cart. She threw herself on the bodies in a state of frenzy, and sucked the gushing blood from the wounds, discharging her stomach, and sucking it again until she fainted’. These details came from the Radical agitator and journalist Feargus O’Connor, who was an eyewitness, and one of the last people likely to attempt to blacken the Irish with fantastical tales of barbarity.

5 Famine and Shipwreck

In 1884 three sailors, Captain Tom Dudley, Edmund Brooks, and Edwin Stephens were rescued from a small lifeboat, some time after the sinking of their yacht, the Mignonette, during a summer storm. The trial of Dudley and Stephens for the alleged murder of young cabin boy Richard Parker, on whom they fed to survive, brought to light many similar cases. Yet, whilst the popular image of these involved famine cannibalism, blood-drinking was very common during shipwrecks. Dudley and Stephens had in fact drunk Parker’s blood before eating any of him. In other cases, the ship’s surgeon let the blood of the living, which they drank, or which was sometimes mixed with flour to make a crude kind of bread.

After HMS Blonde was wrecked near the Sandwich Islands in February 1826, survivors began to feed on the flesh and blood of those who died of famine. Among the dead was one James Frier, a young man ‘who was working his passage home under a promise of marriage to Ann Saunders, the female passenger’. Saunders, ‘when she heard of Frier’s death, shrieked a loud yell, [and] then snatching a cup from Clerk (the Mate), cut her late intended husband’s throat, and drank his blood, insisting that she had the greatest right to it’.

4 Blood Baths

In and after 1610, the Hungarian noblewoman Elisabeth Báthory was accused of torturing and murdering hundreds of young girls and women at her home, the Castle of Csejte. The highest number of victims given was 650. In Tony Thorne’s book Countess Dracula, reports tell of girls having flesh sliced from their buttocks and made into sausages, being burned with red hot tongs, or staked out covered in honey whilst ants swarmed over them. Long after her own death, it was said that Báthory had bathed in the blood of her victims to restore her skin to youthful glory. Thorne argues that this was one of the few things she definitely did not do – in part because blood would normally coagulate so quickly after death as to make the baths near impossible.

Similar beliefs resurfaced several times during the worst excesses of the French aristocracy. In 1676 Paris chief of police Nicolas-Gabriel de la Reynie heard rumours that an ailing noblewoman was sending out agents to kidnap children, so that she could bathe in their blood as a cure against leprosy. When similar rumours burst out afresh in 1701, supposed abductors ‘were beaten almost to death’ by enraged parents. In 1750 Parisians rioted over the belief that King Louis XV was using the blood of kidnapped children ‘to cure his rumoured leprosy’.

3 Blood Money

In Nine Pints, her recent book on blood, Rose George notes that in 1998 ‘a barrel of crude oil was worth $13’ whilst ‘a barrel of blood would have cost $20,000’. As she also explains, much of the value of human blood now comes from plasma. Talking to plasma entrepreneur Jesse Karmazin, George was told that ‘two litres of plasma [price $12,000] can cure cancer, heart disease, and diabetes’.

Where is all this red gold coming from? Whereas Europeans giving plasma must leave at least two weeks between donations, the FDA allows Americans to sell plasma twice a week. George found that, in the ten years from 2006, the number of US people ‘selling plasma grew threefold, to 32.6 million’. Since the Great Crash of 2008, people living on $2 a day can ‘raise their income to $3 or $4’ as they might ‘by selling scrap metal or sex’. She adds that, ‘when the journalist Darryl Lorenzo Wellington became a “plasser”, as regular plasma sellers call themselves, he experienced extreme fatigue, passing out for five hours’. Other sellers he spoke to told of ‘pains, rubbery legs, and severe dehydration’. But, as one plasser put it, ‘“I can’t eat if I don’t plass”’.

2 Sanguinarians

In her book American Vampires, Norine Dresser describes how a woman named Kristin would bite her ‘donors’ on the neck with her small, fang like teeth to drink blood. Kristin told one donor that ‘there was a panther inside her … and at certain times didn’t know whether she might rip a person apart’. She told Dresser she needed one cup of blood per week in winter, but a pint or more in summer, adding that the blood ‘makes her feel energized, full of life, satisfied’, and that animal blood would not produce this effect. Kristin’s belief that vampirism ran in her family, making her pale and needing to wear sunglasses in daylight sounds less strictly medical.

Nonetheless, more recent research supports the possibility that certain people require (rather than merely liking the idea of) human blood. Jana Britton has spoken to a number of sanguinarians who often partner up with their human donors. At least one of these people claimed to survive on nothing but human blood. Others complained of very low blood pressure, low body temperature and pulse rate. Mainstream medicine is shy of this topic, leaving us without clear scientific answers. But it is interesting that few of Britton’s correspondents, or those interviewed in the US by John Edgar Browning, complain of problems caused by blood drinking. Most of us would suffer the symptoms of iron toxicity, which (as Harvard psychiatrist Steve Schlozman informed me) range from confusion and seizures to death.

1 QAnon and the Blood of Innocence

When walking to Constantinople in 1990, author Jason Goodwin met a Romanian woman who told him that former leader Nicolae Ceaușescu had used a secret network of mountain caves where he had ‘reared babies like veal calves, and sought eternal youth with regular injections of their blood’. We can broadly see how Ceaușescu, like the French aristocracy, had earned such a reputation. But the targets of this enduring myth of power feeding on the blood of innocence are surprisingly varied.

For hundreds of years, educated Christians seriously believed that Jews kidnapped Christian children to use their blood in religious rites. Nowadays, we have QAnon. Here, anti-semitism is again present, with George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg and the Rothschilds often cited in wild conspiracy theories about the Deep State and child trafficking rings. Another target for these claims is Hollywood celebrities. Children are said to be trafficked for sexual purposes, and to have their blood harvested to produce adrenochrome for members of the ring. Although adrenochrome would be quite accessible through legitimate means, and no evidence exists to support these beliefs, QAnon has grown significantly in America and beyond since the Pizzagate controversy of 2016. Myths about children abducted for their blood or organs often have roots in genuine abuses (of the poor or powerless) by the powerful. QAnon, by contrast, seems to involve a mental loss of power or stability, on the part of people who are relatively privileged, yet traumatised by the nature of a changing world.

Top 10 Things You Need To Know About QAnon

About The Author: Richard Sugg is the author of 13 books, including Fairies: A Dangerous History (Reaktion, 2018), Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Middle Ages to the Falun Gong (3rd edn, 2020), The Smoke of the Soul (2nd edn, 2020), Bloodlust (2020) and Ride Your Horse through the Chocolate Sauce! His work has appeared in The Guardian, BBC History, The Lancet, the Daily Telegraph, Der Spiegel, the New Yorker, and on international radio and television. He posts videos on his work on Instagram and Twitter @Dr Sugg.

Most people see bats as dreadful, vampire-like creatures from hell, synonymous with darkness and the bloody horror stories we’ve grown up with. This immediate association of fear and dread most probably stems from the tales of the bloodthirsty Count Dracula and even from Batman, when Bruce Wayne tells Alfred, “Bats frighten me. It’s time my enemies share my dread.”

Interestingly, this “dread” of bats is most common in Western and European countries. In places like China and Japan, bats are symbols of happiness and good fortune. In ancient Egypt, bats were believed to have powers that could cure poor eyesight, toothache, fever, baldness, and even prevent the entry of demons into houses. Just goes to show the power that media has in shaping our outlook on life and even our deepest fears.

But I digress. Regardless of what YOU may think of bats, today we will be exploring some of their habits that may be scarier, kinkier, weirder, and downright creepier than you’ve ever heard of before. So much so that they might make you take to your heels even faster than Dracula coming for your blood.

Related: 10 Amazing Things You Didn’t Know Bats Could Do

10 No Pee-Free Zone Here

Urine showers, anyone? Certain species of bats have been known to anoint themselves with their own urine. Yeah, that’s right. Bats use their own urine to scent themselves. This behavior, known as “urine-wash,” partly explains the thick cloud of foul-smelling air that surrounds bat colonies and definitely explains the smell of individual bats.

So next time you need to get a lost bat out of your attic, think twice about using your bare hands to take it out. Some gloves would be handy, or maybe just leave it there so it can think long and hard about its personal hygiene choices.^[1]

9 Get to the (Penis) Point

At least 14 bat species have barbed penises or penile spines, with some barbs reaching 1 centimeter (0.4 inches) in length. Yikes! The hoary bat has penis barbs that are 6.6% of its body length. That’s the same as a 183-centimeter-tall (6-foot) man having 12-centimeter-long (4.7-inch) barbs on his penis. Yikes again!

Scientists speculate that the barbs could be used to hold the two bats together (often while mating in mid-air) for optimal reproduction. Another possible reason for the spines could be to clear out the leftover sperm in the female from another male bat. This ensures a maximum chance of reproduction being successful. The reason a male bat would have to clear out another bat’s sperm is because female bats can hold sperm inside them and wait for an optimal time for fertilization based on the environmental conditions.^[2]

8 Lending a Helping…Hand

Bats are known to be very sexually active, and they have been known to masturbate several times a day. Not only do they take care of themselves, but they help their friends out too. Mutual masturbation is common between male as well as female bats.

Conservationists, who rehabilitate bats, have had a few pretty hairy encounters of them being hormone-fueled pleasure addicts (and pretty disgusting ones at that). My favorite story is about one bat keeper who didn’t realize that a bat had just ejaculated all over its own face. It then proceeded to sneeze on the bat keeper, transferring a healthy amount of the fluids right onto the keeper. Stay away, kids.^[3]

7 It’s the Summer of Love…All the Time

By now, I think it’s pretty clear that bats are very enthusiastic about sex. Besides the copious amounts of sex that goes on between male and female bats, it’s common practice for bats to play for the other team whenever possible. Groups of male bats have been caught in the act, as well as groups of female bats rubbing their lady parts on each other.

This often occurs when the members of the opposite sex are not available for mating, such as when they are hibernating, foraging, or hunting. But this same-sex behavior is also common when members of the opposite sex are around and available. Not only is this behavior common, but often it is very rough among males and inflicts harm on one of the bats involved (you can use your imagination here).^[4]

What I do know now is that if STDs existed in bat societies, I’m pretty sure they’d have all of them.

6 The House of Guano

Bats live in squalor. They have an extremely fast metabolism and have to constantly eat to keep their energy levels high. But a fast metabolism also means a quick digestive system. So this means bats frequently have to pee and poo, no matter when, where, or who it’s on. Bats excrete some type of solid or fluid roughly every 20 minutes.

So be careful when going caving since the floor of bat colonies are full of excrement called guano. Guano is great for the natural environment as a fertilizer but not so great for our noses or hygiene. A large amount of guano is also the perfect breeding ground for disease and the creatures that carry them, such as flies, cockroaches, rats, and the bats themselves.^[5]

5 Rap Sheet: Spreading Disease

Bats can be disease carriers. They carry diseases such as ABLV (Australian Bat Lyssavirus), which causes a fatal rabies-like disease in humans. (Although people are hardly ever directly infected from bats). They also carry the Hendra virus, which they transfer to horses and, in turn, to us. Histoplasmosis, a rare lung infection, can be picked up from the droppings in bat caves.

Like bats, rats are also notable disease carriers. But these two animals aren’t the only culprits out there—they just tend to have a bad rep earned through horrific historical plagues and epidemics. However, humans are more likely to catch something from livestock, including pigs, chickens, cattle, goats, sheep, and camels.^[6]

I don’t know about you, but dying of a fatal disease kinda scares me more than Dracula at this point.

4 For a Good Time…

Fruit bats seem to enjoy using their long tongues for other things besides licking fruit. They are one of the few animals known to engage in oral sex, and nobody knows exactly why they do it. Scientists say that it could be to help with stimulation, lubrication, or maybe they just enjoy it (can’t really blame them, can you).

This behavior does not only happen between male and female bats. Many male bats have been caught in this act with other males, as well as female bats with other female bats. I’m starting to think that bats are just sex-crazy and a bit too kinky for their own good. I just keep thinking about #9 above. Um, spiky barbs! Ouch!^[7]

3 It’s a Smelly Life

Bats are very smelly creatures and use their smell as a means of communication. They have glands on their necks, which they use to scent themselves, as well as the things around them. Mother bats may use scenting to identify their young in a crowded area, while others may do it to recognize each other or find mates.

The smell is not very noticeable unless you have a bat in very close proximity to you or if it has been trapped/kept in an enclosed space. That is, unless you stumble into a huge colony with thousands of bats where you may just pass out from the stench and wake up lying in a bed of bat poo and fluids. I’d honestly rather just leave them in peace.^[8]

2 And Now for the Blood

What is a bat list without mentioning the infamous vampire bat? Do not fear, readers. I won’t bore you with the usual facts about vampire bats that you already learned about in preschool. What I will say is that vampire bats hardly ever use humans as a source of blood. They usually use cows, chickens, or sheep as hosts. Some even pretend to be baby chicks and snuggle up to the mother hen, proceeding to drink some of her blood. But the creepiest thing about vampire bats is that they tend to return to the same host they drank from the previous night.

So if you do get bitten by a vampire bat one night, then it will most likely come and visit you again the following night. It’s like having your very own little furry best friend that comes to visit you every night (and also drinks a teaspoon of your blood). But we can gloss over that part, right?)^[9]

1 But It’s Not All Sex and Disease

Now for some information that doesn’t paint bats as the bad guys. Bats are vital to many ecosystems as well as our crop industry. Bats keep fruit and crop-eating pests under control, saving farmers billions of dollars in pesticides and destroyed crops. So really, bats are good for the economy too. Who would’ve thought!

Bats are also pollinators and seed dispersers. Since they are so abundant throughout the world and there are so many different kinds of bats, they are responsible for a major part of reforestation in badly affected areas, like those devastated by wildfires and other natural disasters.

So as much as you may want to stay away from touching and watching bats go about their *cough* interesting *cough* lives, they deserve to be respected and admired from afar. They deserve our protection, too, so that they can continue adding value to our lives…while obviously enjoying theirs.^[10]

There is nothing that adventurous gourmets won’t eat. Name an animal, fungus, or plant, and someone somewhere has eaten it. That’s even true for a great many inanimate objects. Therefore, it should come as to surprise that people eat and drink blood. It’s not just Twilight-wannabes or ancient cannibals, either. Dozens of cultures consume blood in practically every way imaginable. Whether stirred into drinks, baked into loaves, flavoring desserts, or even made into protein bars, blood is everywhere in our food. Pulled from countries worldwide, here are ten of the best and most bizarre delicacies made using blood.

Related: Top 10 Bizarre Uses Of Blood

10 Blood Milk, Kenya

The Maasai are a tribal people native to Kenya and Tanzania. They gained worldwide fame for the traditional lion hunts they used as ritual ascendancies to manhood before modern bans on lion hunting. One practice that still draws the Maasai’s attention is their habit of drinking blood.

The Maasai’s existence is heavily dependent on their cattle. Almost the entirety of the tribe’s diet comes from the animals⁠—not just milk and beef but blood as well. The Maasai have learned to cut the jugulars of their cattle in exactly the right way to drain their blood without killing them. They consume the blood raw, cook it into jelly, and even mix it with milk into a sort of savory milkshake.

9 Czernina, Poland

Czernina/czarnina is a Polish soup that uses its base animal, duck, more than most. The stew is a simple one, and the main ingredient is duck meat. It sets itself apart from similar meat stews with its sweet, sour, and tangy broth⁠—made using the duck’s blood.

The broth takes on a unique quality by mixing the blood with vinegar and sweeteners like honey and fruit syrup. People will sometimes substitute the duck with chicken, pig, or even rabbit, but its blood defines the stew no matter the meat. Polish tradition says that delicious czernina was used to comfort young suitors who were turned away. I’d want to drink some blood if I was rejected…mostly I’d want to cry, but blood soup is good, too, I guess.

8 Sanguinaccio Dolce, Italy

Blood pudding should be a fairly familiar dish to the U.S. and Europe, so this next one isn’t that bizarre. In fact, it sounds pretty tasty with some fava beans and chianti. 

Sanguinaccio Dolce is an Italian dish whose name means sweet blood pudding, which hits the nail right on the head. Its primary ingredients are what you would expect from a pudding recipe⁠—milk, chocolate, sugar, and possibly flour, vanilla, cinnamon, and/or raisins. It’s the pig’s blood that makes Sanguinaccio Dolce stand out, though.

The sweet treat gained notoriety when it was featured in season three of Hannibal, a show about the murderer-cannibal of the same name. Hannibal Lector, however, chose to make his Sanguinaccio Dolce with cow’s blood and then with…another kind of blood.

7 Blood Tofu, China

There are about a half dozen different food items in China with different names that all mean the same thing. Call it what you will—dark tofu, black tofu, blood tofu, blood curd, among other names. Blood tofu is made by coagulating pig blood into a thick block with a tofu-like consistency, hence all the names.

The dark tofu poses a potential problem for travelers in the region, specifically vegetarians and vegans. People traditionally order tofu as a vegetarian substitute for meat, and obviously, blood tofu is far from vegetarian. Like tofu, though, blood tofu is used in various dishes, from rice to noodles to soups.

6 Blodplättar, Sweden

Blodplättar is an interesting meal by itself, as it’s made like an otherwise average pancake but with the addition of whipped blood. But blodplättar is also interesting because it’s the tip of a culinary iceberg.

While blodplättar is a Swedish dish, you can find almost identical recipes all across Europe. In Spain, they know it as filloas de sangre, or blood crepes. In Finland, it’s veriohukainen. In Estonia, it’s called verikäkk. And blodplättar is far from alone in Swedish cuisine. The Swedes also make and consume blood soup, blood pudding, blood potato dumplings, and blood bread. 

5 Pig Blood Ice Cream, U.S.

Increasingly over the past decade, creameries in the United States have begun experimenting with using pig’s blood in their ice cream. One of the earlier creators of the recipe was D.C. chef Garret Fleming, whose goal was to combine modern ice cream with Italian blood pudding (Sanguinaccio Dolce). The result is a rich, thick cream with a higher than usual mineral taste (because of the blood).

Pig’s blood ice cream gained popularity for two other reasons as well. For one, since the fluid is mixed in as a substitute for the egg yolks, which normally thicken the cream into a custard, it makes pig’s blood ice cream an accommodating option for those with egg allergies. For the other, just the thought of bloody ice cream has made the treat a popular seasonal offering in the weeks leading up to Halloween. You may find ice cream shops offering it under names like “Dracula’s Blood Pudding.”

4 Hematogen, Russia

Though it was actually invented by the Swiss in 1890, we have long associated Hematogen with Russia. The country has produced its own Hematogen since the 1920s, used it as rations for its soldiers during World War II, and even sells it to this day in pharmacies as a nutritional supplement for children. So what is hematogen? It’s a sweet, chocolatey nutrition bar like a PowerBar. Instead of whey protein, however, it’s made with cow blood. You could probably guess it’s a blood-based food just by looking at the name.

Hematogen is sold in stores and marketed both as a sweet but healthy snack and as a medicinal supplement; its high iron content is said to help prevent anemia and support blood count in pregnant and nursing mothers. Before the collapse of the USSR, stores sold the bars nearly everywhere in Russia and its affiliated nations. Since then, a scarcity in “black food albumen,” i.e., cow’s blood, has caused the bars to be less ubiquitous.

3 Snake Wine, Southeast Asia

Snake wine goes by many names in many different Asian countries, and it is made in just as many different ways. However, what is common to every variation is that it is made from some mixture of snake blood and wine. Many Asian nations eat snake meat, though the meat has to come from non-venomous snakes to be safe. You can only consume venomous snakes if the various proteins that make up their venom are denatured. The ethanol in alcoholic drinks does the trick perfectly, and thus the popularity of snake wine.

Most snake wines fall into one of two categories: either mixed or steeped. The mixed variety is made by directly mixing snake blood with the alcohol (typically rice wine). You can use other body fluids, but never venom. The steeped variety involves placing an entire snake in a container of alcohol and letting it steep for anywhere from weeks to years. In that case, venom is denatured and therefore safe. Both varieties are claimed to have medicinal properties, most commonly as treatments for male virility problems.

2 Sundae, South Korea

It would be a shame to close out this article without bestowing some seriously useful advice: do not order a sundae in Korea thinking you’ll get ice cream and hot fudge. At least check to see what kind of sundae they mean. In Korea, “sundaes” are blood sausages, and though they sound tasty, they would be an unwelcome surprise for anyone seeking a cold, sweet treat.

Sundae comes in many varieties, but all are a vegetarian’s worst nightmare. All are made by steaming cow or pig intestines and stuffing them with blood and other ingredients, sometimes even adding bits of liver and lung. Combined with the traditional ingredients of meat, rice, and vegetables, sundae look and sound delicious, especially those served with gochujang. They’re most common as street food, so at least you’ll probably see which sundae you’re getting.

1 Black Broth, Ancient Sparta

The ancient Spartans are world-renowned for their ferocity and battle prowess, as well as the wild lengths they went to prepare themselves for battle. One such offbeat preparation was the consumption of Spartan black broth or blood soup.

The black broth is subject to intense debate. Some historians believe it was a staple food for most Spartans, while others think it was reserved only for the rich or special occasions. Historians also debate whether Spartans drank it for strength or celebration. Likewise, historians are torn about its ingredients. No recipe has survived that is 100% accurate. Most likely, the broth was a mixture of blood, pork, salt, and vinegar, and there is evidence to suggest that it was reserved for the young, while the elderly drank the blood raw instead. What we can be sure of the dish, however, is that the broth contained blood, which is so very Spartan of them.