The Andouillette Does Not Travel

Misadventures with a sausage.

The butch alcoholic bistro owner staggered unsteadily to my outdoor table (Jonzac, 2016) and plonked herself down opposite, sighing and gesturing vaguely to the empty square.

‘Jonzac!’ She said, finally, in withering disgust.

Without asking she helped herself to one of my Gauloises Blondes. Shaking it clumsily out of the packet, she lit it, exhaling theatrically before starting a ten minute monologue about - I think - the pressures and unceasing depressions and deprivations of running a (very) slow brasserie in the arse end of Bordeaux.

‘Jonzac’ She said, finally, sighing.

‘Jonzac’ I agreed, taking a pull on my pastis. Shaking herself slightly on realising that she hadn’t taken her only customer’s order, she rose unsteadily and nodded expectantly at the classic red leather folder menu in front of me.

‘Andouillette’ I said.

Mild concern crossed her face.

‘You, err, like it?…you know it? You know the andouillette?’

‘Yes. I know the andouillette…I like the andouillette’

A layered, folded, malodorous sausage that inspires devotion or revulsion - and nothing else - the andouillette is made from pork intestines and tripe (hopefully) thoroughly washed and scrubbed before being boiled in a court bouillon, spiked with champagne, pepper and nutmeg and encased in a final - disconcertingly thick - layer of intestinal passage. It can be heavenly. It can be horrifying. Again, nothing in between. There is no such thing as an ‘indifferent’ andouillette.

Usually served with a creamy mustard sauce and/or fried onions and mashed potatoes or chips, the andouillette is, on one level, the very essence of ‘acquired taste’. But that feels too passive, somehow. Can you ‘acquire’ a taste for a sausage that carries - at best - a bouquet of French barnyard, complete with ancient mud, sour wine, rat infested hay bale and goaty/porcine/ bovine layers of old animal?

What of a sausage that can also carry, as bad ones are said to - aside from those mild top notes - the scent of death magnetic? Of adrenalised, oinking slaughterhouse? Of a sausage that evokes imagery of a bleak Monday morning at an abattoir in a dilapidated Lyon outer suburb in 1972; hulking foreman from the Ardennes reeking of morning Calvados; two silent inbred brothers with glassy expressions opening buck fastening; of a small wizened man with a clipboard and a cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth who never looks up; of the strange, near human eyes of many pigs; of the grim formality of staff meals in some small airless canteen presided over by a strapping Burgundian matron paddling out heaping portions of Coq au Vin atop overcooked buttered noodles; of the distant hum of generators and the pencil scratch of hastily filled lotto tickets by thick thumbed slaughter-men?

Closely associated with Troyes in the south of the Champagne region, the Andouillette’s spiritual home is Lyon, where it remains a staple of Bouchon culture alongside heavy, old school trenchermen dishes like Quenelles de Brochette and pot -au - feu - invariably washed down with ‘pots’ of cheap Beaujolais.

The Bouchon stable is hearty and unashamedly meaty. But the Andouillette retains its status as the most challenging dish in the Lyonnaise repertoire by dent not only of its distinctive aroma but also its appearance.

There’s trench warfare in those folded intestinal tracts.

A traditional ground sausage is, of course, an exercise in subterfuge; a means of disguising off cuts via obliteration of form, not only chopping but grinding - a mechanised obscurity. Likewise, in Sicily the Fritilla venders of Palermo offer scraps of veal offal, cartilage, skin and the like fried in lard and boiled with bay leaf, lemon and pepper. But the pan in which the stark scraps of meat are cooked remains shrouded. Covered with a large white cloth, each portion is surreptitiously, almost shamefully, ladled out- a rejection of traditional Italian pride and flare in favour of a ritualistic omertà.

By proxy, the andouillette is starkly unhidden. The sausage is not fully encased. The entwined filling is shown - proudly - at cross sections. There is no disguise. It’s the anti sausage, in this regard. If/when concealment comes it will be in the form of sauce. In the nineteen fifties the brilliantly grotesque catering phrase ‘napping’ was used for the swaddling of a dish - often an indifferently cooked piece of meat or fish of dubious provenance- in a plentiful ladle of sauce. The andouillette is, too, often ‘napped’ in a thick bath of creamy mustard spiked sauce.

A few weeks ago I ordered one online. It was sent vacuum packed from France. Looking back, with the scant benefit of three weeks hindsight, I see this as the height of idiocy; the very pinnacle of culinary hubris - akin to ordering a plastic four litre brace of Cretan Retsina for home consumption on a cold English December night. Of course an Andouillette doesn’t travel. Of course you need to be sitting at a routier or a Bouchon or a brasserie for it to make any sense.

What the fuck was I thinking?

I want it, was what I was thinking. It was the middle of a heatwave. I was delirious. I didn’t just want it, I had to have it. I had fevered visions of drinking cold rose as I leisurely fried it to be accompanied by a simple scoop of mash, some fried onions mixed with wholegrain mustard, a splash of white wine bubbling down, little spoon of cream to finish.

Somewhere, deep down, I realised that this was a fool’s errand. The first andouillette I ordered went missing, omen like, lost in the bowls of some depot. The second arrived on a very hot Wednesday. It was packed in some kind of silver contraption, presumably designed to keep it cool but it was, assuredly, not cool. It held the faintest whisper of chill. Not to worry, I thought. The best before date is sometime mid July. I’ll put it in the fridge until it’s nice and cold and I will cook it in two days time.

As I started to grill it my wife looked up from the World Cup. ‘it smells like the Maze in 1974’….’just put the fucking extractor on!’….’it smells like a Frenchman I don’t know has come in the house shat in a Le Creuset, put an onion in it and cooked it’…she eventually left the room in disgust. She was right. It did smell obscene. I was starting to think I had found it - the fabled bad andouillette - the one that people report on in hushed tones of post traumatic disgust. This wasn’t just barnyard. This was near wicked: an abomination.

The taste was worse. As far from the plump, meaty, gutsy bistro ideal of Jonzac and elsewhere as it was possible to get. Most startlingly of all, it didn’t actually register as food.

I chocked down three hideous forkfuls….. the andouillette does not travel.