September 07th 2007 Posted in
Pigs,
Pork 
Well loyal readers, I am back. Did you miss me? I certainly missed y’all! What can I say? I am sorry I have left you in the lurch over the past few weeks. I had a really great trip. You can check out all of my pictures here. Among all of the various highlights of traveling around Europe for 3 weeks, pork was certainly up there, and we enjoyed a lot of it.
God knows, the Europeans love their pork, and there is no shortage of it. Everytime you turn a corner, there it is another Charcuterie, windows laden with untold porky treasures.
I realized how good it was going to be the first day we got there, driving up into the French Alps from Geneva. Outside of Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, we passed an outdoor stand loaded with baskets full of sausages. We pulled over and got out of the car to peruse. I looked with slack jawed amazement at the unbelievable assortment of sausages: plain pork, smoked, duck, with nuts, with herbs, with olives, with cheese, with berries, with whatever-other-thing-that-could-fit-into-the-casing! It was amazing, and I wanted to try them all. This trip was gonna be tough.
All of these lumpy looking sausages, stuffed in natural casings, covered with a white mold, sitting unattended outside in baskets certainly looked strange and foreign to me; not a sight you would see in America. But I soon realized these sausages were very typical, and delicious. We somehow made our mind up, and got one of the herb “encrusted” sausages, mainly covered with rosemary. If I need to tell you, it was delicious.
We had many great meals that were nothing more than cheese, bread, and sausage in one of their many varied forms. I have heard friends come back from Europe saying as much, and now I can really understand. All of those things are so fresh and readily available everywhere, and simply wonderful.
We spent some time in the Val D’Aosta region of Italy, and sampled some of the hearty mountain cuisine there, including this wonderful porky appetizer:
In the front is Mocetta (which is actually a very nice cured beef) and in the back is Lardo, thinly sliced cured pig fat, which was savory and sweet, delicate and rich, with a great, soft, smooth texture. Wow, the wonders of pig fat.
In the town of Aosta, we wandered around looking at Roman ruins and pork. We randomly went into this charcuterie:
We went in and struck up a conversation with a very friendly and interesting young butcher (barely pictured in the shadows of the door in the picture above) who was happy to practice his English and seemingly anxious to move away from his small town. He gave us the low down about some of the local meats including Lardo, Mocetta, and also Boudin Sausage:
Boudin, which is also the name of a famous Cajun sausage, is a Val D’Aostan specialty that is prepared from potatoes, diced lard, beetroot, spices, sometimes carrots or wine, and coagulated pork blood. The sausages are stuffed in thin natural gut casings and tied and hung to dry. It was a really mild, sweet sausage which we cut up and ate at room temperature. The potatoes gave it a really soft creamy consistancy, and it was a great marriage of vegetable matter and pork fat. As for the blood, if that turns you off don’t let it; the Boudin was delicious.
In general it was a pleasure to go into any little charcuterie and look around. We waited patiently in line for about 45 minutes in this one, in the town of Noyers, France. We were only third in line but each customer took their sweet time carefully selecting each item they wanted. I enjoyed passing the time in line watching the butcher and a couple of assistants carefully butchering a whole pig. Everything looked wonderfully delicious, and we ended up getting some quiche-like tarts and some duck sausage.
In most cities we were in, there are market days in town that put US “Farmer’s Markets” to shame, and offer a great selection of produce, cheese, meat, and of course sausage! This vendor in Beaune had a great selection of sausage. We tried his smoked sausage which was plain, but very enjoyable.
This market in Colmar was great, and we loaded up on cheese and produce and again, you guessed it, sausage. I actually went up to this vendor and bought a smoked sausage, and an onion tart. Alissa and I sat down in a nearby park and split the tart for lunch. I decided to have a bite of the sausage. It was good, very good! I had another bite, and another, and soon it was gone. I walked right back to the vendor and asked for another. The woman laughed and guessed that I liked it very much, and seemed genuinely flattered by my appreciation of her pork products. We ended up having a nice exchange with her, with our very limited French, about sausage, being from America and our trip.
Ok, so everyone associates the French with good food, and that is all well and good, cause it’s true. The Germans however get a pretty bad rap, which I generally found unfounded. Yes, there is some bad food but in general, and especially if you like pork, you are in luck in Germany. How about this Alsatian dish (I know its still France, but also very German), called Choucroute:
Unfortunately this picture doesn’t quite show what a porky wonder this meal really was, so let me describe it. On the bottom was a really wonderful spiced sauerkraut (choucroute) with Juniper berries, literally piled with a selection of pork that only a starving or insane person could eat. I was both. The pork pile included: Lardon (basically a very thick-cut maple-flavored bacon, delicious), a “Strasbourg” sausage (basically like a big, and very good quality hot dog), a thicker and more savory sausage, a ham steak, and some jambon d’or ( “ham off the bone”, which was sliced right off of a giant ham rotating on a mechanical spit just inside the door of the restaurant, SO GOOD).
In Germany proper, we ate quite a few traditional German dishes which I typically enjoyed very much. At worst, I would find the food uninteresting, but satisfying, and at best I would be delighted, finishing it off with a crisp German beer. We were lucky to stay for 5 days in a no longer operating guesthouse owned by an old family friend of Alissa’s in the small town of Mappershain, near Weisbaden. Heidi, who grew up there running the place as a guest house with her family, prepared us many wonderful traditional German meals, many prepared over a wood fired stove and including produce from her oversized garden. I didn’t really get any photos though, shame on me.
I would also like to mention that I love the German breakfast, even more than the French: satisying black bread, rolls, butter, cheeses, yogurt, soft boiled eggs, and always a good selection of cured meat. I could eat it everyday. Here is a picture of (part of my) breakfast at Gasthaus Lowen, in Opfingen, near Freiburg in the Black Forest:
Now this is a breakfast to get your day going right: delicous smoked Black Forest ham, dense and hearty black bread, cheese, butter, some excellent liverwurst, and a touch of OJ. Not pictured, probably already in my belly, was some yogurt with raw oats, a soft boiled egg and a couple cups of coffee with fresh milk.
Anyway, it was a great trip, and we had a great time. I gotta run now, but stay tuned for more pig posts. Sorry about the long absence. I won’t leave you again. Here are a couple more pig pictures to tide you over. I forget what the sign in German says. Someone tell me.
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