The British used to love offal but now we tend to be a bit wimpy about it, unlike the French or Italians, let alone the Austrians. (I once ate a pig’s lung in Vienna. Its texture was rather like an Aero bar.)
In the UK you’re unlikely to find a restaurant that would serve you andouillette or tripes à la mode de Caen. Even that traditional British staple steak and kidney pie is a rarity these days. Mind you, I did once eat bull’s testicles in an Italian restaurant – Macellaio on the Old Brompton Road. They’ve since been given the chop from the menu.
In Italy, particularly Venice, they cook their liver with thinly sliced red onions and red wine: Fegato alla Veneziana, delicious. In Piedmont you sometimes see Finanziera on the menu. It’s not for the fainthearted. It’s a melange of offal that includes gizzards and entrails as well as veal brawn, sweetbreads, kidneys, chicken livers and testicles, all in a beefy broth with red wine, peas and porcini, topped off with a chicken’s cockscomb.
The Victor Ludorums of the offal world are sweetbreads (ris de veau), made from a calf or lamb’s pancreas, and brains (cervelles de veau). Unlike liver, which has a fairly gutsy taste, sweetbreads and brains are delicate, soft and very tactile in the mouth – the offal version of a marshmallow.
Andouillette, on the other hand, is a challenge. It’s the French equivalent of Marmite – you either love it or loathe it. For a start, the haters can’t stand its smell, eager to point out that the French for offal is abats, conjuring up nasty abattoir images, or worse still, déchets, which means garbage or rubbish. It was Édouard Herriot, three-times prime minister of the Third Republic, who said: ‘Politics is like andouillette, it should smell a little like shit, but not too much.’
I had the pleasure of meeting this magazine’s ‘Still life’ columnist, Catriona Olding, briefly at The Spectator carol service in December. Fortunately, that was before I read her column in which she described andouillette as ‘a coarse and malodorous sausage made of colon’ that she goes out of her way to avoid – in spite of her friend Geoffrey pointing out that a really good one doesn’t smell that much. As it happened, we spoke about the less divisive subject of painting.
Of course, andouillette’s admirers adore its smell. They even have an association specially for its fans: AAAAA, which stands for Association Amicale des Amateurs d’Andouillette Authentique. You’ll know you’re eating a five star-quality andouillette if it’s been awarded five As.
Andouillette goes back to the Middle Ages. There’s a recipe for it in a book written in 1393 titled Le Ménagier de Paris. As well as recipes, the guide includes instructions on how to run a home, gardening, morals, social and sexual relations and even falconry. As for the andouillette, not a lot has changed since that 1393 recipe. It’s still the same coarse sausage made from pig’s intestine.
Once you’ve mastered your andouillette, it’ll be time to move on to the offal aficionado’s absolute top favourites: tête de veau (calf’s head) or, better still, groin de cochon pané à la moutarde, sauce diable – the nostrilly end of a pig’s snout, in devil’s sauce. You’ll be hard-pressed to find any of these delicacies in Britain.
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