More about the Pig

I will not venture to disgust you with an account of how we sacrificed the pig and what we did to it next.   But I thought I would whet your appetites with something very French and very delicious.

That a dog finds rotting rabbits very delicious is not surprising, it’s all a question of taste.  There may well be a being out there who observes us benevolently but finds both us and our habits quite repulsive.

Being young and curious when I went to France, I had no difficulty embracing French food and was prepared to taste anything at least once. 

Which takes us back to the pig.  My friend, the belle Paulette had come to help out and appeared in the kitchen with a plastic bucket.

'We must go to the wash house and clean these,' she shoved it under my nose.  There was nothing pleasant in there at all.

'What are you going to do with that?' I asked in disbelief.

‘Andouillette,’ she announce emphatically.

‘Andouillette?’

'A kind of sausage,' she beamed.

'Alright, let's go to the wash house, then.'  Having a washing machine, I had not yet visited this oddity but had heard that for some old ladies it was a habit that died hard.

We drove to the next village and parked by a smallish building with a low tiled roof.  Paulette threw open the stout oak door and ushered me in.  A square basin, the size of a smallish swimming pool, brimmed with river water which flowed in one end and out the other. Funny little wooden boxes, like hassocks but open on one side, were stacked at the far end.  Paulette grabbed one and placed it besides the pool.

‘Look, we used to do it like this,’ she knelt down as if to pray but instead mimicked scrubbing on the sloping stone rim.  I tested the water.  It was icy. 

Chilblains must have been a common ailment for those poor women who had to do their laundry in winter.  I knew all about chilblains, having had them often enough myself.  My father, who sometimes came up with some earthy lore from his childhood had told me that the best remedy for them was to whip them with fresh nettles.  Needless to say, I had not been in a hurry to put that particular remedy to the test.  When I was a child I just thought he was being cruel but learnt subsequently that fresh nettles were also good for rheumatism and arthritis.  It’s the acid in their sting that is supposed to be efficacious.

 A three sided lean-to roof provided some shelter from the elements and gave the place a cloister like tranquility.  Only the gushing water and the soughing of the great grey willows that overshadowed the opposite bank broke the silence.  I could have sat there for hours.  But it was not to be.  Paulette went back to the car and fetched her plastic bucket and contents. 

‘We must wash them now.’  I nodded dubiously. I really didn’t want this job at all. She knelt down in the box and extracted from the bucket a very long and bloated pig’s gut. 

‘We do it like this,’ and niftily turned the gut inside out like a stocking and as she did so freed a very long turd which floated off into the clean pool.  I tried to breathe through my mouth.

‘Andouillette are very good,’ she reassured me.  I had got the message but was far from convinced.   When the gut was empty, she produced a knife and showed me how to scrape the inside lining clean and rinse it in the pool.  Bravely, I set to work.

Just then the door flew open and a man with a bundle of osier walked in.  He seemed to me to somewhat out of place in this very female sanctuary where devotees of the river goddess were want to worship.

‘Bonjour,’  I cried, embarrassed, seeing that the offending turds were still bobbing around in the pool. I should not have worried. Pointedly ignoring us both, he dumped his bundle in the pool and left.

‘What’s he doing?’ I asked Paulette who was a fountain of wisdom when it came to local doings. 

‘Gipsy,’ was her laconic answer as if that explained everything.  He came back a bit later and pulled out a few willow wands from the pool and in no time at all a basket began to take shape, teased and twisted into place by his very nimble fingers.  How I would have loved to be able to do that.

The man was a very typical Rom, swarthy with dark hair and brown eyes. If he spoke French, he did not let on and  made a point of ignoring us, as if we did not exist in his world at all.  I could only gawp and admire his skill.  Before we had finished with the guts, his job was done.   Leaving his osier to soak, he took his new basket and left.  He made baskets but the women folk peddled them around the village.  I exchanged a fine roasting chicken for one of them and it lasted for years.

I digress.  To get back to the Andouillette…  The secret to making these sausages is as follows

First clean the guts as explained above.  Scrape the insides clean but be very careful not to pierce the gut.  Use the back of a knife.

Put the cleaned guts into a jar or earthen ware pot with dry sea salt until you want to make the sausage.  These pots are called saloires in French or Charnieres in patois from the West of France.  It’s what you use to salt pork or anything else.

To make the sausage, you have to rince and soak the guts to get rid of the salt and you need lots of welsh onions.  They have green tops and make bunches which grow into clumps.  So you need to slice up a lot of these onions and you take the big gut and stuff it with the little guts and the onions to make a firm sausage.  You season with pepper and a few spices and tie up both ends with string.  Then you poach them very gently in simmering water for a good thirty minutes.

To prepare.  Best light the barbecue and place on an oiled grill until crispy.

Delicious once you have got over your initial repulsion to eating things that contained sh…  

Some say they taste like sh..  but then maybe sh.. is an acquired taste!  I will leave that debate to others.