French Sausages - or How I Nearly Ate a Tuantuan.
I was 13, and my family and I had just driven down to the Loire for a holiday. It had been a long and hot and cramped journey; none of us was in a particularly good mood. Still, we'd arrived at our gîte, and it was lovely, and was just across the street from a winery with a restaurant attached. It looked a bit more haute cuisine than we might normally have chosen - especially when two of the diners were grumpy kids who just wanted feeding rather than fine food - but since we were all too fagged to bother looking anywhere else, we went there.

I'd been studying French for a couple of years, so was quite looking forward to being able to show off by navigating my way around the menu. Better yet, my mother went to catering college, and had lived in the Francophone bit of Switzerland for a while in her youth, where she worked in a restaurant; she'd know what was what. Even so, there was a couple of things that puzzled us. What, for example, was an andouillette?

The waiter told us it was a kind of sausage. That sounded great to me. It's what I ordered.

It arrived.

It didn't look all that great: a sort of pale beige colour, and a strange shape. Still, I was hungry, on holiday, and feeling adventurous. I was undeterred, and cut into it.

You know that bit in The Empire Strikes Back where Han uses Luke's lightsabre to cut open a tuantuan? Cutting into the andouillette was like that. It became horribly apparent that this "sausage" was, in fact, simply a piece of gut, loosely stuffed with other pieces of gut. It may have tasted wonderful: but there was no way I was letting it anywhere near my mouth.

I looked pleadingly at my dad. He had ordered something slightly less insane, and had a bit of a reputation within the family as someone who’d eat anything. He looked at my plate, and a look of utter resignation passed over his face. We swapped orders. Even he could only finish his meal by cutting the andouillettes into pieces so small that he didn’t really have to chew them. (It was plain that, after all, the stuff did not taste better than it looked.)

I’m quite an adventurous eater for the most part – but there’s a couple of lines that I will not cross. Tuantuan sausage is on the other side of one of them.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 27 May 2011, 9:39, 2 replies)

My ex wife's cousin loved the stuff.

( Davros' Granddad a voice of calm reason in a world of spastics., Fri 27 May 2011, 10:05, closed)

You know, after all these years,
I never knew you had an ex-wife.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 27 May 2011, 10:21, closed)

I'm sure I may have mentioned it in passing ;)
She's dead.
( Davros' Granddad a voice of calm reason in a world of spastics., Fri 27 May 2011, 10:48, closed)

Well, thank god I didn't make the joke I was going to, eh?

( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 27 May 2011, 11:13, closed)

Which was..?

( Davros' Granddad a voice of calm reason in a world of spastics., Fri 27 May 2011, 11:15, closed)

Something along the lines of how you're better off without
someone with a genetic link to a person who likes those things.


Maybe the reason I didn't make it was because I had a vague back-of-the-mind memory of you having mentioned her... Thank goodness for my non-blundering subconscious.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 27 May 2011, 11:46, closed)

I wouldn't have minded.

( Davros' Granddad a voice of calm reason in a world of spastics., Fri 27 May 2011, 12:03, closed)

Chortle; clicking for poor old dad.
Your story picqued my interest so I looked to Wikipedia on Andouillette:

A coarse-grained tripe sausage...Their strong smell can be reminiscent of feces

Yum!
( Pig Bodine., Fri 27 May 2011, 12:54, closed)