Saucisse de Montbéliard

What sets the saucisse de Montbéliard apart from its neighbour, the Morteau, is a spice: caraway (Carum carvi), commonly called cumin in Franche-Comté, though it is an umbellifer distinct from the cumin of the East. The two sausages share the same territory, the same softwood smokehouses, the same Comtois pigs and the same peasant origin. But the Montbéliard bears the trace of its own history, which explains the presence of caraway.

The Pays de Montbéliard was held by the counts, then the dukes, of Württemberg from 1397 to 1793, nearly four centuries. A Lutheran principality enclaved in Catholic Comtois territory, administered in German, it maintained continuous commercial and cultural ties with Stuttgart, German-speaking Switzerland, and the Rhine Valley. Integration into revolutionary France in 1793 did not erase those four hundred years of Germanic impregnation, of which the caraway in the sausage is one of the most tangible culinary vestiges. The plant, moreover, grows spontaneously on the plateaux of the Haut-Doubs, and the PGI specification designates it as a local plant.

Caraway is not, however, a properly Germanic spice. Its natural range, stretching from the Atlantic to the Central Asian steppes, allowed independent appropriations: codified in Central Europe by the medieval monasteries, present in the Arab-Andalusian cooking of the thirteenth century, whence its passage into Tunisian harissa and the Levantine sausages, used as a wild aromatic in the Mongolian steppes. The Montbéliard illustrates one of these three trajectories.

The European PGI was obtained in 2013, two years after the national approval of 2011. The production area covers the four departments of Franche-Comté: the Doubs, the Jura, the Haute-Saône and the Territoire de Belfort. The specification requires a minimum diameter of 25 mm, stuffing in a pig’s small casing, which gives the sausage its slightly curved shape, and softwood smoking for at least six hours in a conventional smokehouse or twelve hours in a tuyé. Today, more than 20 approved curers produce some 6,000 tonnes of saucisse de Montbéliard PGI a year, with production steadily growing since the label was obtained.

The sausage is traditionally sold in pairs, the two units separated by a simple twist of the casing. The boitchu, the crank mincer in use from the 1830s, gave its name to the brotherhood founded in 1977 to defend the product, and its coarse plate remains the reference of the specification. The pairing with cancoillotte, the melted Comtois cheese served warm, is the codified regional usage; the Fête de la saucisse de Montbéliard, created at Montbéliard in summer, draws several tens of thousands of visitors each year.