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Considering how strong the taboo against blood consumption in Judaism is, it's hard to understand how it was possible for Christians throughout Europe and over many centuries to believe an absolutely dumb and vicious gossip about Jews using Christian children's blood for making matzah. In Poland, some monarchs attempted to suppress it. As early as in 1264, Duke Boleslav the Pious of Greater Poland issued a famous charter of Jewish privileges, known as the Statute of Calisia (Kalisz), whose article 30 explicitly forbade anyone from spreading the spiteful rumour. Seventy years later, King Casimir the Great extended the law from the province of Greater Poland to the entire Kingdom of Poland. But despite these efforts, the canard continued to serve as an excuse for anti-Jewish pogroms for centuries, including the particularly shameful post-Holocaust Kielce Pogrom of 1946.
What does the prohibition against blood consumption mean in practice? Well, the animal must be butchered in such a way that lets it bleed out as quickly and as amply as possible, and then the carcass must be dressed in a way that will remove almost all of the remaining blood. This so-called Jewish ritual slaughter is practised by specially trained butchers who are required to cut the animal's throat with a single pull of a long, very sharp, unserrated knife, severing the wind pipe, the food pipe and major blood vessels in the neck at the same time. Next, the carcass is quartered, larger blood vessels are removed, the meat is soaked in water, buried in salt and rinsed with water again, so as to get rid of the last drops of blood. The liver, which is especially well supplied with blood, must be additionally grilled.
[[File:Kosher salt.jpg|thumb|Coarse uniodized salt which is used for kashering (making kosher) meat is known as "kosher salt" in American English.]]
