Andouillette vs. Andouille: Never Again

Okay, before recounting my night out tonight, let me just make a Public Service Announcement:

NEVER CONFUSE ANDOUILLETTE AND ANDOUILLE.

I was aware of the distinction, but I clearly had them backwards. After spending 6 hours straight at the BnF (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the national library of France)—which will merit a separate blog post one of these days—I was clearly a bit tired and confused. So when I stopped in at my local Monoprix to pick up some sausage to cook with some vegetables as dinner, I looked at a package of Andouillette de Canard and thought two thoughts:

1. Oh good, this is the one that isn’t made of pig’s poop-chutes.
2. 2. And it’s “de Canard” (“of Duck”), so there’s no chance that they would include pig colon in this thing.

I was wrong on both counts. Andouillette is, indeed, the sausage made of the pig’s entire digestive system (stomach, intestines, colon) and an “andouillette de canard” is just a regular pork andouillette with some duckmeat added; the pig-guts are still in there.

Now, I have eaten some scary and/or gross stuff in my life, and I will admit to loving the taste of stinky cheeses of various sorts, but this stuff is really, really unbelievable. Although the pork chitterlings (a southern US name for pig colon) are obviously well-cleaned before being stuffed into the sausage, there’s something in the actual tissue of the colon which the human nose identifies with the smell of pigshit. To be more precise, pigshit gets part of its aromatic “bouquet” from something in the pig’s colon, and that smell persists in the colon itself, regardless of how much you wash it.

So when I opened the package (as the vegetables were already sautéing) and got a whiff of the contents, I balked. “Surely that odor will disappear once the meat is heated up,” I thought. When I put the slices of sausage in the pan, the odor of shit got so strong, I had to open a window and let in the glacial night air. “Surely the odor will cook out after a few minutes,” I thought. The odor got stronger and stronger and took on an acrid overtone. It didn’t just smell of pigshit anymore, it smelled of pigshit and overcooked liver and blood sausage and dirt.

Thinking strategically, I thought that the tannins of a red wine would probably dampen the odor and cover it with a similarly “earthy” smell, so I de-glazed the pan with a half-bottle of wine and cooked it down to a thick sauce.

The final product was inedible for most palates. The vegetables turned out tasty and even the red wine sauce was pretty good (if a bit iron-heavy), but the sausage still smelled like shit. The actual taste in the mouth was more like eating tripe that had been flavored by liver and kidneys (not exactly delicious), but the odor was omnipresent. To my credit (I think), I finished all of it.

But I am never fucking eating that disgusting shit again.

[considering that this post is already a bit long, and considering that Tuesday is going to be a quiet day for me, I think I’ll post my review of my night out as my Tuesday post]