The horror, the horror

Sausages, along with being hilarious, are a hallmark of European cuisine. Preserving meat was terribly important before refrigerators were invented and the creation of the sausage changed our world. Think how much poorer our society would be without kolbasa, chorizo and slim jims. But not all sausages are good. Some reveal the most disgusting extremes which people are willing to stretch the word food.

Indeed sometimes they can be pure unimaginable grossness. Woe unto the unsuspecting traveler who tries Andouillette sausage.

Now, to appreciate the following story, you have to imagine me with that distant look veterans get when they talk about Da Nang: I was fresh off the airplane from Bordeaux to Paris, at the very beginning of my long and strange journey that would be my semester Paris. I wanted something hearty and filling, so I stepped into a café and ordered “le saucisson Andouillette”, assuming it would be some big golden log of comforting pork products. The thing showed up looking gorgeous, slathered in hot mustard with fries and salad; basically exactly what I wanted. But to my horror the first bite tasted like a mouthful of sewer. Well, maybe not sewer, maybe more like strange pig organs that I, the ignorant American Jew eating pork subconsciously trying to piss off my mother, didn’t know what I was tasting. So I went back for another: worse. Really just like eating piggy sewer. It was like licking Divine’s face, or perhaps the after taste of an hour-long make out session with Britney Spears. Really just nauseatingly awful.

So I tried to avoid strange pork products for a while, until, like a sucker, I bought andouillette again. To be fair, it was a duck product called andouillette and looked like a tasty duck sausage, so I just wasn’t that concerned. However, the second I cut into the sausage a foul smell of uncooked grossness and brimstone emanated out of the meat. I threw the things out and went on wikipedia the next day determined to figure out what andouillette was and why the hell any French person would eat it. That is when I made my shocking and horrifying discovery.

Andouillette is tripe and chitterling sausage. DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT IS??? Tripe is intestines! Sausage is intestines! Worse than that CHITTERLING IS COLON! I WAS EATING INTESTINE STUFFED INTO INTESTINES WITH A DASH OF COLON!!! TWICE!

No wonder it taste like a sewer. I’ve tasted tripe 3 times before, time foolishly assuming I’d like it, and each time finding it beyond revolting. Even writing this makes me ashamed to have and use my intestines. The colon part though was just unacceptable (I could make a really crude joke here at the expense of a certain population at Vassar college, but I think I will let you connect the dots...)

The French clearly like meat so much that they will combine any edible piece of meat with another. Cassoulet is a delicious example of this; andouillette is a horrifying example. I know rustic french cuisine has a certain charm, but this is one of those things like black plague and the comedy of Jerry Lewis that are better left in the past.