Samuel Mangion recalls returning home from school and helping his father make blood sausages. His family had been producing mazzit for 200 years.

“When I was in Form 4 and Form 5, I made it every Wednesday,” Mangion, now 33, remembers.

However, after Malta joined the EU in 2004, sanitary regulations put an end to the delicacy, as the government did not have the costly equipment needed to collect the blood for mazzit (singular mazzita) in line with EU rules.

It bought that equipment two years ago, installed at the public slaughterhouse in Marsa. 

“This allows blood to be gathered in a sanitary way,” the slaughterhouse’s director, Stefan Cachia, said. 

Butcher shops then started buying the blood and making their own mazzit. However, they could only sell the sausage to individual customers. Because of sanitation rules, business-to-business sales still could not take place.

The slaughterhouse sells 800 kilos of blood a week for the production of mazzit, and about 10 butchers produce it.

“Although the product disappeared for almost 20 years and has been limitedly available since 2022, it is still popular,” Cachia said.

Now, the product may soon find its way to supermarket shelves and restaurant menus. Last week, the government announced a new facility in the slaughterhouse where mazzit can be produced in-house and sold to businesses.

It is not the government that produces the sausage.

“Producers can book a slot at the new facility, bring their ingredients and recipes, and make it,” Cachia explained.

The only ingredients provided by the slaughterhouse are blood and the sausage’s casing. Government employees supervise the process to ensure everything is up to standard.

Two people currently use the service, and Mangion is one of them.

So what’s in the mazzita?

“Everyone has their own recipe; it’s like a cake ‒ everyone puts what they think is best,” Mangion said.

But in general, the blood sausage contains onion, herbs, almonds, chocolate, sugar, raisins – and, of course, the blood from a pig or a young bull.

“In a large pot, you fry the onions well in pork fat before adding the herbs. You then put in the other ingredients before coating everything in blood.

“The secret to the process is cooking the onions well.”

The mazzita dates back to at least to the 1750s when a recipe was described in Giovanni Pietro Francesco Agius De Soldanis’s work Damma tal-Kliem Kartaginis mscerred fel fomm tal Maltin u Ghaucin.

However, the word ‘mazzita’ comes from Greek, indicating that the blood sausage might be far older than the 18th century, Mangion said.

Based on the description given by Agius De Soldanis and research by history students, the slaughterhouse and other stakeholders came up with a rough recipe for mazzita.

A group dubbed the ‘Mazzit Stakeholders Group’, which includes the slaughterhouse, is now planning to apply for a protected geographical indication (PGI) status from the EU for the mazzita.