Cervelas

The word cervelas derives from the Latin cerebellum, brain, an etymology it shares with the Swiss cervelat, treated in a separate entry. The Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, published in 1751, gave a description already close to modern practice: lean pork, veal, fatback, and spices, minced and stuffed into a casing, then cooked before sale. The brain, the original ingredient, disappeared from the recipes over the twentieth century; the name survives with no link to the present composition.

Two French regional traditions coexist under this same name without resembling each other. In Lyon, when one orders a cervelas, one receives a large cooking sausage, pink, coarse-grained, stuffed into a beef casing. In Alsace, the same word designates a fine-textured sausage, tender pink, smoked over beech wood, closer to the Frankfurter würstchen than to the Lyonnais sausage. Neither the size, nor the texture, nor the technique, nor the use coincide. A Lyonnais, told about the Alsatian cervelas, does not recognise his product, and vice versa.

The cervelas alsacien belongs to the Rhenish charcuterie space. Its making is based on the ‘ice paste’: the meat (pork, beef and sometimes veal) is emulsified in a bowl cutter with crushed ice to obtain a smooth, melting texture. The forcemeat is stuffed into natural casing, hot-smoked over beech wood and then poached. It is eaten in many ways: cold in a salade vigneronne (shredded with batons of gruyère, onions and a mustard vinaigrette), a classic of the winstubs (the traditional Alsatian taverns); poached in the choucroute; or grilled in summer. The preparation known as obernoise, a speciality of the town of Obernai, opens it out like a wallet, fills it with cheese (emmental, comté or the local bargkass), wraps it in smoked farmhouse bacon, then finishes it in the oven. The Alsatian cervelas shares with the saucisse de Strasbourg the same fine-emulsion technique and the same beech-wood smoking, but differs in its larger calibre (natural hog casing rather than fine sheep casing) and its pinker colour.

The Lyonnais cervelas is a product of another family. Called saucisson à cuire or saucisson chaud indifferently, it is mentioned by Rabelais in Le Quart Livre (1552), chapter XLI, where a ‘gros cervelat saulvaige’ fights alongside the Andouilles against Quaresmeprenant.

The name cervelas lyonnais is attested in the eighteenth century, when Paris could also obtain cervelas from Troyes or Metz. The influence here is Italian rather than Germanic. The forcemeat, based on pork belly and shoulder, has a coarser grain than that of the cervelas alsacien. It is stuffed into a natural beef casing and then warm-cured for several hours in a hot room, which develops a pink colour and fixes the flavours. Every charcutier keeps their seasoning recipe secret: some add port, others cognac or Banyuls.

What sets the cervelas lyonnais apart from its Alsatian namesake, beyond texture and technique, is the use of pistachio and truffle. The whole blanched pistachio, folded in by hand after mincing so as to remain visible at the cut, is the signature of the cervelas pistaché, a product that does not exist in Alsace. The cervelas truffé, with black truffles from Tricastin or Périgord, is reserved for Christmas and sometimes for Easter. Served warm in a salad with green lentils or potatoes in oil, it is a classic starter of the bouchons lyonnais (traditional Lyonnais tavern known as a bouchon). Wrapped in a butter brioche and baked, it becomes the saucisson brioché lyonnais, whose juices perfume the dough as it cooks.