Diot de Savoie

The diot is the farm sausage of the Savoyard valleys and the Bugey. Its forcemeat joins leek white sweated in butter with a local white wine, two ingredients no other French fresh sausage uses in this way. The leek brings a vegetal sweetness that softens the fattiness of the pork; the white wine, an Apremont, a Chignin or another Jacquère wine depending on the producer, brings a light acidity that permeates the flesh from the forcemeat stage, even before cooking.

The etymology of the word diot remains uncertain. The term is said to come from the Savoyard patois diô or djo, which simply designated the sausage or something small and modest. Some connect it with the boundious, a family of blood sausages and dry sausages whose names refer to the sacred, like the Jésus de Morteau (a variant of the saucisse de Morteau). Others derive the word from Sabaudia, the Latin name of Savoy. None of these hypotheses appears to rest on clear sources; the term probably belongs to an oral transmission in the mountain farms, recorded late in the regional books.

The making of the diot was tied to the pig slaughter, the autumn practice that built up the winter stores. Each farm had its own recipe, and the diots were kept in oil, ash, or hay to prolong their shelf life through the cold months.

Cooking in white wine in a casserole with sliced leeks over gentle heat is the preparation that defines the diot in contemporary Savoyard usage. But the older method is cooking over vine shoots: the diots are laid in a pot (a branzin in patois) on a bed of vine shoots moistened with Savoy white wine. The wine does not cover the shoots, so that the diots cook in the steam of the wine without bathing in it. This slow braising tenderises the flesh, degreases the juice and produces a sauce poured over polenta or over crozets, the small square pasta of Savoy. A few valleys cook in red wine, which gives a darker sauce and a more marked aromatic profile. A variant now rare, the diots à la troya, cooked the sausages in the still of the travelling distiller; it is disappearing with the last itinerant bouilleurs de cru.

The diot comes in several uncodified versions: plain (salt, pepper, nutmeg), the most common; smoked, dried for a day or two over fir or beech, near the Franche-Comté border; with cabbage, which works chopped white cabbage directly into the forcemeat, a process shared by several Alpine charcuteries on both sides of the frontiers; with Beaufort, a more recent variant; and with herbs, variable by butcher (thyme, savory, parsley). Some cooks add a spruce branch to the casserole, a practice belonging to a wider tradition of using Alpine softwoods in cooking.