Mutura: the roadside blood sausage, and how to buy a piece of it

Overview

Mutura is a sausage made from the large intestine of a goat or a cow, stuffed with minced meat, chopped offal, fat and the animal’s own blood, seasoned with onion, chilli, garlic and fresh coriander, tied off, boiled, and then finished over charcoal until the casing crisps. It is sold in one place and one place only: a grill on the pavement, in the evening, by the piece.

The word is Kikuyu and so is the dish. In that language mũtura is the large intestine itself, which tells you where the recipe starts: at a slaughter, with the blood caught in a container and salted immediately so it does not clot, and the large intestine separated from the small. Everything in it is the part of the animal that has to be used the day it is killed. That is not a colourful detail, it is the whole logic of the food, and it is why mutura belongs to butchery districts and to the hours after the day’s slaughtering.

What it tastes of is iron, fat, smoke and coriander, in that order. The blood makes it dark — the cut face of a slice is nearly black — and gives it the mineral note that is the whole point and also the thing people either like immediately or never. The casing, grilled, goes brittle and slightly chewy. It is much less strange than its description: closer to a coarse, dark, heavily seasoned sausage than to anything you have to be brave about.

It is regional rather than the city’s own — it belongs to the central highlands and to Kikuyu cooking generally — but Nairobi is where it became street food. A capital full of people from those highlands, working late, buying dinner on the way home, turned a slaughter-day dish into an evening one you can buy for coins on a pavement anywhere in the city. That is the version this article is about.

You will see it written as “African sausage” on menus written for visitors. It is the same thing, and the translation tells you the menu was not written for the people who eat it.

What to order

The transaction is short. You say how much you want, in money or in pieces, and it is cut in front of you.

Ask by value or by the piece. A vendor slices a length off the coil and cuts it into rounds on the board; a hundred shillings’ worth is a normal snack, two hundred a substantial one. There is no menu, no plate and usually no seat.

Say whether you want it hot from the grill. It sits coiled on the grate and is turned constantly; what you want is a piece cut from the part still over the coals rather than from the end resting at the cool edge.

Take the kachumbari. Raw tomato, onion and chilli, spooned over the slices, and it is the correction the dish needs — acid and crunch against iron and fat. A wedge of lemon does the same job and is often on the board. This is not a garnish to be polite about; without it the third slice is heavy.

Salt and pili pili. A dish of coarse salt and one of chilli sit on the board and you dip.

Two related things worth knowing the names of, because they are grilled beside it and are not the same:

• Mutura ya damu — the blood version, dark and mineral, which is what most people mean.
• The blood-free version — meat, fat and offal only, paler, milder, and increasingly common. If you would rather not, ask; nobody will be offended, and the answer is honest.

The drink is a cold beer, and the hour is after dark.

What to avoid

This is the one dish in this city where the usual advice about queues is not a preference but the whole safety argument, so it is worth being plain about it.

Buy where it is turning over. Blood and offal at ambient temperature is exactly the food you want to be the hundredth customer of, not the first of tomorrow. A busy grill in the evening cooks and sells continuously; a coil sitting on a cold grate at eleven in the morning has been there since last night. Go in the evening, go where the queue is, and buy from the length still cooking.

Watch it be cut. The board, the knife and the hands are in the open, which is a feature: you can see whether the surface is clean and whether the slices come off a hot section. If the vendor reaches for a bag of pre-cut pieces, buy elsewhere.

Grey inside is wrong. A good slice is dark red-brown to nearly black at the centre with a crisped casing. A pale, greyish, dry cross-section means it was boiled long ago and only warmed through.

Do not order it in a hotel. It appears occasionally on tourist-facing menus as “African sausage”, plated, at twenty times the street price, and there is no version of that which is better than a pavement one — because everything good about it comes from being cut hot off a grill that has been running for four hours.

And the honest health note, stated once: this is blood, offal and intestine, cooked twice but handled in the open. People who ought to be careful with such food — in pregnancy, with a compromised immune system, with small children — should simply skip it rather than look for a safer stall.

Practicalities

It is one of the cheapest hot foods in the city: roughly 50 to 200 shillings buys a proper portion, and it is normal to buy by naming the amount of money rather than the weight. A restaurant version, where it exists, is several times that and is not several times better.

The hours are the most fixed thing about it. Mutura is evening food — grills light up in the late afternoon and run into the night, and the good ones are busiest between about seven and ten. Lunchtime mutura exists and is usually yesterday’s.

There is no season, and the useful thing to do with that here is to use the day of the week instead: weekend evenings and paydays are when the grills sell most, which means fresher stock and faster turnover. A quiet Tuesday is the night to be choosier about where you stop.

Mobile-money payment works even at a pavement grill and is what most customers use; a small note works equally well and cards do not exist here. Eat it standing, at the grill, within a minute of it being cut — every part of what makes it good is temperature, and it does not survive the walk home.