Mastering the Art of French Eating Page 5

  The second thing I noticed was the half a pig lying splayed on the counter like an anatomy model or a butcher’s diagram. There was the hind leg, ready to be carved off and cured into ham. There were the ribs, racked as if on the barbecue. There was the belly, soft and striped with fat just like the bacon it would become. A scooped cavity in the center indicated the spot where the intestines used to coil. “I wanted to show you where the tripe comes from in the pig,” Maury told me.

  But the pig hadn’t taken up residence for my personal edification alone. It was destined to become the array of prizewinning charcuterie that Maury sells in his store: jambon, boudin blanc, boudin noir, pâté de campagne, and terrine. Like his father before him, he makes 90 percent of his own merchandise, purchasing and preparing a whole pig every Wednesday. (During my visit he changed to Tuesday to accommodate my schedule.)

  A visit to Maury’s workroom was not for the faint of heart, yet being there felt also quite magical, like paying homage to an ancient and respected métier, one that is rapidly disappearing in France. I admired the accoutrements of the trade squeezed into a small space—a smoker in the corner, the commercial oven next to it, a large vat to boil andouillette, the basement’s walk-in refrigerator where sausages were hung to age. The room was a paean to frugality, with every last edible morsel found, seasoned, and sold.

  To make the andouillette, first Maury plunged the tripe and stomach into scalding water to clean them. He cut each organ by hand into zigzagging strips, interconnected so that they formed one long, narrow chain. Deftly twisting the intestines together, he sprinkled them with diced onions, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and a dash of his secret blend of spices. He finished with a drizzle of Champagne, which is produced in the region, and white vinegar—both unique to his recipe. “Usually we’d leave it now to marinate for two to three hours,” he told me. But with an eye on the clock, he proceeded directly to the enrobement, grasping a piece of intestine casing and expertly sliding the twist of tripe and stomach inside. In the final step, he would simmer the sausages gently—they’re very delicate—for at least five hours in a vegetable bouillon. “They lose about a third of their mass,” he told me. “The best part is, they’re cooked for so long that all the fat just disappears.”

  “What’s your favorite way to eat andouillette?” I asked.

  “Grilled on the barbecue. Or with a creamy mustard sauce, topped with a slice of Chaource”—a soft cheese, similar to Brie. “Stick it under the broiler for a few minutes to melt the cheese . . . eat it with a few steamed potatoes, maybe a little choucroute . . . Et voilà. C’est très fin dans la bouche.” He looked as if he might like to polish off a plate at that very moment. “Voulez-vous en goûter un morceau maintenant?” he asked me suddenly. “I could pop an andouillette in the oven. It would be done in a second.”

  I looked at my watch. It was nine-thirty in the morning. I hadn’t yet drunk a sip of tea or eaten a crumb of baguette. “C’est très gentil de votre part.” My voice squeaked a little. “But maybe next time. It’s a bit early for me.”

  “C’est vrai,” said Maury. Still, I thought he looked a little disappointed.

  * * *

  * * *

  Andouillette has a pedigreed history. Louis II, known as “the Stammerer,” served it at his 878 coronation banquet, held in Troyes. Centuries later Louis XIV also declared himself an admirer, stopping at Troyes after a battle in neighboring Burgundy to stock up for the victory feast. The sausage even had the power to seduce, as discovered by the French royal army in 1560. Attempting to conquer Troyes, royal soldiers breached the city walls and spread through the narrow cobblestone streets of the Saint-Denis neighborhood, where they suddenly halted en masse, drawn to the allegedly tantalizing aroma rising from the quartier’s tripe shops. They lingered, stuffing themselves with andouillette, which gave the town’s troops time to assemble and swoop to victory in a surprise attack.

  As I strolled the same narrow cobblestone streets, I couldn’t help but wonder, why Troyes? How did this charming town give birth to such a divisive delicacy? With its magnificent, flamboyant Gothic cathedral, its rows of medieval timber-frame houses decked in Easter-egg pastels, Troyes gives off an air of wealthy respectability. During the Middle Ages, the town was an important post of the Champagne fairs (named after the region, not the wine), graced by the rushing river Seine, which flows through its center. As Troyes’s market attracted people from all over Europe—with, for example, the Flemish exchanging linens for Mediterranean silks and spices—the town dished up its specialty, andouillette, to thousands of hungry travelers.

  The Lemelle andouillette factory is located on the city limits, a family business started in 1973, housed in a gleaming white building in the zone industrielle. Through a window onto the factory floor, I saw enormous blue vats of boyau, pork tripe, enough raw ingredients to produce eighty thousand andouillettes a day. Workers clad in caps, rubber boots, and gloves hefted enormous trays of sausages to the boiler room, where they would simmer the links in stock for hours. The factory has 160 employees working around the clock in shifts, stopping only from Saturday afternoon to Sunday night.

  In his sunny office, I asked Dominique Lemelle, who together with his brother, Benoît, owns the factory, if he could explain the letters AAAAA, which I’d often seen used to describe andouillette. An American friend had told me never to eat any with fewer than five A’s. “What do they stand for?”

  “C’est l’Association Amicale des Amateurs d’Andouillette Authentique,” he said. Loosely translated, it means “the Friendly Association of Authentic Andouillette Connoisseurs,” nicknamed “5A” (pronounced cinq ah). The group, a sort of fan club, was started in the 1970s by five andouillette lovers and food critics—among them the celebrated French food writer Robert Courtine, who wrote under the pseudonym “La Reynière”—with the goal of protecting the standards of tripe sausage. Since then the club has doubled in size, meeting two or three times a year to sample andouillette from around France and award certificates of exceptional quality. “I once went to one of the tastings,” said Dominique. “It started at noon and didn’t finish until eight o’clock at night. We ate at least seven whole andouillettes, with a poached chicken in between each one to clean our palate.”

  Dominique showed me his framed AAAAA certificates, illustrated with five cavorting cartoon pigs, each representing one of the association’s five founding members. “Every two to three years, the panel reviews our product,” he said. A certificate is good for two years, as long as the charcutier doesn’t change the recipe or method of production. (If necessary, a special written authorization can extend the award’s validity until the next tasting.) “The 5A defends the valor of andouillette,” said Dominique.

  Though generally prized by charcutiers, the AAAAA award is not an official government mark of quality, and there are some who choose not to participate in the association’s tastings. The independent charcutier Patrick Maury is among them.

  “I don’t want to be a part of that,” he told me.

  “Why?” I asked, surprised. He didn’t seem shy of competition. I glanced at the shelves of his boutique, lined with dozens of trophies and medals—over seventy prizes—that Maury has won since taking over from his father in 1995. For four years in a row, the Compagnons de la Gastronomie Porcine, another gourmet appreciation society, has named his andouillette the Champion of France and Europe.

  “Ninety percent of AAAAA andouillette is industrial,” he explained. “If you participate, people think your products are made in a factory. I want to stay artisanal, personal, familial. I’m protecting the authenticity of the veritable andouillette of Troyes.”

  For a minute I wondered if his objections had the tinge of sour grapes. But I didn’t detect any bitterness in his voice. In fact, his argument seemed to illustrate the current state of French cuisine, which teeters between factories producing food in gross quantity and tiny, family-owned boutiq
ues and restaurants passed from generation to generation. Being in Maury’s shop was like stepping back thirty years, to a time when supermarkets hadn’t yet spread to every French village and housewives made the daily rounds at the butcher, baker, and greengrocer. During my morning visit, Maury was doing a brisk business—on average he sells between thirteen hundred to fifteen hundred pounds of andouillette a week. Given his long hours, however, not to mention the intense amount of physical labor, and the economic reality created by cost-cutting superstores, I couldn’t help but speculate how his boutique and, indeed, the art of artisanal charcuterie, could endure another generation.

  * * *

  * * *

  Every andouillette enthusiast I met in Troyes—and I met many—wanted to be the person who convinced me that andouillette is delicious. “A lot of people don’t want to try it because of the smell,” Dominique said to me. “The secret is in the quality of the products. If they’re fresh, there’s no smell at all.”

  I definitely smelled something, though. We were in the factory’s laboratoire, and Dominique and an employee, Pascal, had just shown me their method for cutting tripe and stomach. My time had come. When Dominique offered to slice up some rounds of chilled andouillette, I knew I couldn’t avoid it any longer. “It’s easier to taste it cold,” he said. “When it’s hot, the flavor is much stronger.”

  Cut horizontally, the andouillette had a marbled effect, rosy with swirls of white and dark pink. Dominique offered me the plate, and I tried to summon the enthusiasm of my andouillette-loving friends in Paris. “Eating it makes me feel connected to France,” said Guillaume, a Frenchman I met at a dinner party who had spent most of his childhood in the United States. “Like I’m part of the history and the terroir.”

  “Chunky goodness—comme il faut,” said another friend, Sylvain.

  With the eyes of Dominique and Pascal upon me, I bit into a slice. It tasted salty, highly spiced with pepper and nutmeg, similar to bologna. I started chewing, and the sausage squished between my teeth, at once soft yet cartilaginous, like a stretched-out rubber band. Dominique looked at me expectantly.

  “C’est pas mal!” I said. And, really, the flavor was quite inoffensive. The slippery, ropy, chewy texture, however, seemed to encapsulate the very essence of tripe. I thought of the vat of intestines soaking on the factory floor and forced myself to swallow. The second bite was harder.

  Dominique proffered the plate again. “Another piece?”

  “Non, merci,” I said, feeling a little sheepish.

  That night I met a local blogger, Céline Camoun, for dinner at Au Jardin Gourmand, a small restaurant in the town’s historic center. A friend of a friend had introduced us. “Oh, you’re going to Troyes? My sister’s best friend’s friend lives there. I’m sure she would be delighted to show you around.” And she was. Fier d’être français, et puis fier de ma région—this was a sentence I heard over and over again while traveling in France. Proud to be French, and then proud of my region.

  As a Troyes local, Céline would be an andouillette enthusiast, I figured. Not so. “Je déteste ça,” she told me after we’d exchanged cheek kisses. “My mother and my cousins love it, but I can’t stand the smell.”

  We installed ourselves at a table in the cozy, book-lined room. Céline had selected the restaurant because it specialized in andouillette, and indeed the menu read like an encyclopedia of the stuff, with eleven preparations, some simply grilled or panfried, others with complex cream and cheese sauces, one with a crown of foie gras.

  “I think I’ll have the steak,” said Céline.

  Jacques Lebois, the restaurant’s owner, approached our table. “My friend is an American. She’s researching andouillette,” Céline told him.

  “Oh, I love introducing foreigners to andouillette,” said Lebois, clasping his hands and practically rubbing them together with glee. “Do you know the story of andouillette de Troyes?”

  “Hmm, I don’t think so, no.” Anyway, I didn’t know his version of the story.

  “During the Middle Ages,” he began, “the town was under siege and surrounded by soldiers camped outside the city walls. Eventually, when there was nothing left to eat except tripe, people started making andouillette. The soldiers were so enchanted by the smell that they declared, ‘We’ll let you out as long as we can have some of what you’re eating!’”

  The three of us laughed. Behind Lebois a waiter passed carrying an armful of plates, all of them laden with fat andouillettes in a creamy sauce. The whiff was unmistakable.

  “Are you ready to order?” Lebois produced a pen.

  Céline ordered a steak, and then Lebois turned to me with a gleam in his eye. “May I suggest the andouillette with fromage de Chaource perhaps?” he said. “Or poached in white wine? That’s also excellent.”

  “I think I’ll have . . .” They both looked at me expectantly. “The grilled salmon,” I said eventually.

  “Pas d’andouillette?” cried Lebois. He turned to Céline. “She doesn’t want to order andouillette?”

  “Well, she’s been tasting it all day,” Céline said kindly. “She probably doesn’t want to overdo it.”

  I could tell he was thinking, Is that even possible? Nonetheless, he brought me the grilled salmon. I have to admit, I enjoyed every bite.

  * * *

  * * *

  With andouillette conquered—or, at least tasted—what was next? Back in Paris I luxuriated in the three years that stretched before us, contemplating the feasts that still lay ahead. We would roast a poulet de Bresse, and stack Brie de Meaux against Brie de Melun, and eat a perfect omelette aux fines herbes after the cinema, and taste an array of Burgundies from young to complex, and, and, and . . .

  My running list of places for us to try—restaurants, pâtisseries, chocolatiers, charcuteries, fromageries, boulangeries, cavistes—was so long that I was afraid it would crash my hard drive. And then Calvin got the call.

  Chief of staff at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. It was a big assignment at an important embassy, the type of job that could make a diplomatic career. Calvin tried to remain neutral when he told me about it, but I could feel the excitement bursting from him, even despite the drawbacks, of which there were many. Danger, for one. Danger. He shrugged it off, but when I imagined my husband in a war zone, my heartbeat shot into arrhythmia. Though the embassy was in the Green Zone, encircled like a prison, it was still bombed regularly by mortar fire. Separation. Baghdad was an unaccompanied post—meaning no spouses, no children, no family. If he took the job, we would be apart from each other for a year.

  Calvin, however, listed the advantages. During his year away, I would be able to stay in Paris, in our Belle Époque apartment with its white marble fireplaces and antique parquet floors and flutters of crown molding circling the ceilings. He would take three vacations from Iraq, each lasting three weeks. And after a year away, he would return to Paris. Our three-year assignment would become four.

  “But didn’t we move to Paris to be together?” I crossed my arms. “After all the traveling you did last year?” During our year in Washington, Calvin had traveled for work almost two weeks a month.

  “I have to be ready for service anywhere in the world. Anywhere. Even places where my family can’t go. It’s kind of like the military.” He’d repeated the words so many times I scarcely heard them anymore.

  “And I’d be here alone?” Anxiety rose in my chest—for Calvin’s safety, for my own potential isolation.

  “I know, it’s not ideal. But at least you’ll be in Paris.”

  “It won’t be the same without you.” The words tasted bitter in my mouth.

  During the day, while Calvin was at work, I wept. I understood his ambition because I had it, too, burning inside me, at times as gently warming as a nursery fire, at others as acrid as an ulcer. We both had our own career goals and dreams, but—in my mind at least—we a
lso had an unspoken agreement that marriage and family life came first. A year apart seemed to break that agreement.

  One afternoon I found myself alone in the kitchen, snipping the stems of a bunch of tulips. I reached above my head to pull a vase off a high shelf, edging it past a row of wineglasses. But the shelf was narrower than I thought, and one of the cheap glasses fell and broke with a sharp pop and tinkle of jagged shards. I pulled again at the vase, and another glass broke, shattered by my careless gesture.

  According to the American Foreign Service Association (the closest thing the diplomatic corps has to a union) the foreign service’s divorce rate mirrors that of the general American population. What they don’t add is that it’s 50 percent. I mention this not because Calvin and I ever considered divorce—we didn’t—but to illustrate how naïve I was about the institution of marriage. We had been so happy, so conscientious about making big decisions together—we fought so rarely—that I thought our marriage was indestructible. Sweeping up the shards of glass, I realized that it was as delicate as anyone’s, which is to say, very.

  Six months after our arrival in Paris together, my husband began to prepare for his departure. Neither of us wanted to spend a year without the other, but Calvin’s dedication to public service and—yes—his ambition helped him shoulder the hardship. As for me, I finally agreed because . . . well, because I love him. And part of that love is admiration of his civic responsibility and his ambition and his belief in diplomacy.

  In the two months before he left, the light-starved days of winter grew longer and milder, artichokes and asparagus replaced leeks and chard in the market, and our moods grew darker and darker. We didn’t talk much about Calvin’s departure because talking made it too real; on the contrary, we tried hard to ignore the dwindling time, the days, then hours. But the imminence of it loomed in the shadows of every evening, in a glass of white wine poured at cocktail hour, in the golden glow of the streetlamps when we exited an afternoon movie to streets already dark and wet. Calvin bought me tulips on his way home from work; I cooked a last batch of his favorite dinner, spaghetti and meatballs, and we clung to these thoughtful gestures, to our familiar routine.