Lucky dip - hiding the truth about andouille

"If you have to clean the tripes yourself, the bath is the best place because, as well as having plenty of room, you can fix the ends of the intestines over the cold tap and run plenty of water through."

Jane Grigson

I felt like the surprise of a lucky dip and did I get a surprise!? I picked out a book that I have probably hardly used and the page I turned to was on a subject that is mildly abhorrent to me. Andouilles and andouillettes, which are sausages made from tripe and chitterlings - which I think is the lining of the stomach and maybe the intestines too. Really I don't want to know.

Actually once, my poor son ordered andouille at Paris Go. I had forgotten what it was. It didn't taste nice. But taste is a very subjective and cultural thing is it not? In France andouille are a delicacy. And I have to say their production demonstrates admirable thrift. Every bit of the pig is used and is to be found in the local charcuterie in every village and town in France. In the hypermarkets too. And I'm guessing it's the same in most European countries. In England too - various unnameable bits are used in sausages and things. In the comic world that's what sausages are for.

"Victor eyed the glistening tubes in the tray around Dibbler’s neck. They smelled appetizing. They always did. And then you bit into them, and learned once again that Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler could find a use for bits of an animal that the animal didn’t know it had got." Terry Pratchett

And it's probably a good think not to ask what's in them. Or is it?

My book is by Jane Grigson who is one of my favourites. It's one of her early books I think, maybe even her first and is almost a research project. It does have a few chapters with recipes of interest and I may well have made some of them. I know I considered making my own sausages for a while but how to find the skins to put them in? More or less impossible for a shy young thing like me who wouldn't have the nerve to ask a butcher if he had any to spare. And besides you needed special equipment. And actually, now that I think of it I did buy a special attachment to my electric mixer that would have done the job. But I never did it. The closest I have ever come to making sausages is making hamburgers or those mincemeat sort of sausages that you put on skewers.

Anyway back to the andouille and andouillette. The andouillette is a smaller version basically. You cook them and eat the larger ones cold. The large ones are salted and smoked, the small ones, not always.

She waxes quite lyrical about them:

"They are easily distinguishable on account of their black skins and their mottled greyish-brown section, with the pieces of tripe looking like the fossilised coral in Frosterley marble, or else graded by size and drawn into each other, so that the slices look like regular growth rings across a tree stump"

Well I suppose so, but it doesn't make me want to eat them. I think Oysters are aesthetically rather beautiful too and figs - but I don't like them either. There are several pages of recipes for making them.

The interesting thing though, was that when I did my usual superficial google search on the subject I think just Wikipedia mentioned that they contained tripe and chitterlings - and that was almost as a footnote with respect to French andouille which it obviously thought was a very small and insignificant player on the andouille scene. Nobody else mentioned tripe at all. But I suppose that just shows how American the internet really is. According to the internet you would think that andouille is a Louisiana creole thing. An ingredient in gumbo. Do they not realise how Louisiana cuisine is heavily influenced by French cuisine - and that the French were definitely first on this one? The Louisiana andouille is just a kind of smoked pork sausage. Indeed it looks a bit like the chorizo we talked about recently.

So there you go. A delicacy for some. Jane Grigson at least loved them. And no doubt the French do too. Maybe if you feed these things to children from an early age they will like them. No - not true. Children are picky eaters are they not?

Anyway - andouilles are not on sale in your local supermarket. I don't think it will be the next big trend. Though you can get them at Paris Go.