Andouille

The word andouille covers a far wider territory than its modern sense suggests. Before designating the precise technical category (pork chaudins stuffed into a large intestine, smoked and cooked), it was first named, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, a whole family of French cooking sausages of variable composition.

The recipe entitled Une andouille d’esté given by the Ménagier de Paris in 1393 does not resemble the modern andouille: it is a chopped lamb’s or kid’s pluck, mixed with egg yolks and spices, spread on a caul, rolled, tied, then ‘rostie sur le greil’ (roasted on the grill). The same book, nonetheless, elsewhere gives the technical definition that would eventually prevail: ‘les andouilles sont faites du boyau culier et autres boyaux gros, lesquels gros sont remplis des autres’ (andouilles are made from the large gut and other thick casings, the thick ones being filled with the others). The Middle Ages thus already knew the large andouille in filled casings (the one that would become that of Vire or Guémené), yet continued to call by the same name preparations in caul or of chopped flesh, with a blurred frontier between sausage and blood pudding.

The charcuterie codification of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries progressively reserved the word for the narrow technical category we know today. This lexical history has a direct consequence for the product’s genealogy: Cajun andouille of Louisiana, made of coarsely minced pork shoulder, heavily spiced and stuffed into a casing, is not a corruption of the Norman model, but the legitimate heir of the broad medieval sense that the Acadians carried with them after the Great Upheaval of 1755.

Its origin lies in the popular Latin inductilia, that is, ‘things ready to be introduced into a casing’. The word appears before 1200 in the Roman de Renart, then in Jean de Meung at the end of the thirteenth century (Nuls ne puet bonne endoille faire de tels boiaus). Rabelais makes it the comic centre of the War of the Andouilles in the Quart Livre of Pantagruel. In the eighteenth century, the regional variants entered the printed gastronomic canon: the Gazetin du Comestible mentions in 1767 the andouilles of Troyes, Saint-Malo, Cambrai and Auray; the Almanach du comestible records in 1778 several Breton andouilles, including that of Guémené, described as among les choses les plus remarquables par leur bonté en divers pays. The literature on this speciality is very rich.

The modern andouille, in its codified form, is a cooked, smoked charcuterie based on the pig’s digestive tract, cut into strips and stuffed into a large natural casing. It is distinguished by its size (twenty-five to thirty centimetres, sometimes more), its black or dark brown robe, owed to the smoking, and its pronounced smell. The making is long. The casings, after meticulous cleaning and cutting into strips, are salted and left to macerate for several days, then assembled by hand, smoked over beech wood, desalted, netted and poached in court-bouillon, and finally matured for several weeks. At Vire, the full cycle stretches over nearly three months before sale. This double cooking (long smoking, then poaching) gives the finished product its characteristic stability and texture. The andouille is thus not sold raw: it reaches the counter already cooked and ready to eat.

Vire and Guémené follow two opposed logics of assembly that make them immediately recognisable at the cut. At Vire, the pig’s complete ventrée (chaudins - the large intestine), about 40 per cent; menus, 43 per cent; stomach, 17 per cent, with no added fat, is cut into strips, then assembled by emplissage into a folded ellipse under an outer robe of casing: the cut thus reveals a marbled, fibrous, irregular appearance. At Guémené, the making proceeds by enfilage: pork chaudins of increasing diameter are threaded one inside another around a linen string, which, at the cut, produces a pattern of concentric circles suggesting a tree trunk. The Guémené recipe is limited to two ingredients, Breton pork chaudin and Guérande salt; the beech smoking there is short (two days), followed by two to three weeks’ drying in a dark room.

The andouille de Vire was industrialised at the turn of the twentieth century by Charles Amand, a Vire charcutier, who gave the product its modern commercial form and founded the first great house. The andouille de Guémené Tradition obtained in 2017 a denomination entered in the Code des usages de la charcuterie. Neither variant holds a European geographical protection, despite its long-standing renown and professional codification in the Code des usages.

Other regional traditions survive, codified to varying degrees:

• The andouille de Cambrai (Hauts-de-France), composed exclusively of chaudins flavoured with sage, is not smoked but cooked for four hours at 95 °C in a flavoured broth. It is recognised by its yellow-brown robe and its pinkish, barely chopped interior.
• The andouille du Val d’Ajol (Vosges), 60 per cent lean pork completed with stomach and chaudins, flavoured with white wine, nutmeg, shallot and garlic, briefly smoked over beech. A trademark registered with the INPI in 1984, celebrated every third Monday of February since 1831 at the Foire aux Andouilles.
• The andouille de Jargeau (Loiret), mostly lean pork and shoulder, lightly smoked or not at all. The Code des usages notes that it belongs more to the sausage than to the andouille in the strict sense.
• The andouille de Revin (Ardennes), characterised by a central piece of ham surrounded by strips of chaudins, is cooked for five hours below 80 °C. Entered in the Code des usages in 1986, originally made for Shrove Tuesday.
• The andouille d’Aire-sur-la-Lys (Hauts-de-France), with a pale or brown robe according to the smoking, flavoured with sage.
• The grenier médocain (Gironde), an unsmoked andouille of pork stomach, has been entered in the Code des usages since 2016.

Several more local traditions (the andouille bretonne supérieure, the Savoyard, the Sarthois, the Basque, that of Charlieu, that of Couvin, the sabardin of the Loire) are produced through artisanal or semi-confidential methods.

The mode of consumption that has come to dominate the product’s image, served cold in thin slices, is in fact late (between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries). The hot usage never disappeared for all that: it survives in regional cooking in the buckwheat galette with andouille (Brittany), the tourte or puff pastry with andouille and camembert (Normandy), andouille pan-fried with cream, and the gratin of endives with andouille and cider. There also survives, at Vire, an andouille à cuire, sold raw after smoking, which must be desalted for three days before being poached for four hours. It is the living trace of the medieval usage to which the recipe given above applies.

The andouille spread beyond France with the Acadian diaspora. The resulting Cajun andouille (see its entry) keeps only the name but is wholly transformed. The American product, which made the fortune of the town of LaPlace, Louisiana, self-proclaimed ‘Andouille Capital of the World’, is no longer recognisable as kin to the Vire or the Guémené, but its filiation is documented, and its name is legitimate in the light of the broad medieval sense of which it is the direct heir.