According to British and Irish tradition, black pudding has an esteemed place next to the bacon rashers, sausage links, fried eggs, mushrooms, fried tomato and fried slice in an old-fashioned greasy spoon breakfast, but its almost complete absence from the American breakfast table is confusing, especially given our known preference towards an injection of cholesterol to kick-start the day.

This phenomenon might be partially explained by the less euphemistic title of “blood sausage” in use on these shores. The more descriptive terminology acting as a major deterrent. In fact, blood sausages are an integral part of the diets of many European countries — the morcilla of Spain and French boudin noir, among them — and their former colonies in the new world, especially South America, with the Cajun country cooking of Louisiana and the Canadian province of Quebec being the only areas of North America to demonstrate any real enthusiasm for these dark mystery bags.

Supposedly a corruption of the English word “pudding”, boudin are common throughout France in various colors and flavors, and in many ways the term refers to fresh sausages in general, with the more familiar cognate, saucisson, reserved largely for salumi/preserved sausages. Boudin blanc, made with veal and pork are commonly seasoned with quatre epices (white pepper, ginger, nutmeg and cloves) and closely resemble many of the sausages I remember growing up in England where pale colored pork sausages, flavored most commonly with either apple or sage, were a weekend breakfast table favorite. However, it’s the boudin noir, made with pigs blood, grains, fat and seasoned with white pepper and nutmeg that I am most interested in, perhaps, because of a fascination with just how one makes sausages out of congealed pigs blood, but, principally because their gruesome reputation belies their extremely delicate texture and taste. Their rich color, unique minerally-flavor, and loose, unctious mouth-feel, is obscured by our collective fear of blood, though given the current inexplicable popularity of all things vampire-related, whether this is shared by younger generations is unknown.

In France, there are various centers of boudin production, but it is relatively easy to find throughout the country. The meal above is a take on one we ate in the charming medieval town of Arras (more famous for its wall-hanging carpetry than its gastronomy) in north-eastern France around New Year 2009. The potato gratin and green salad of that meal being substituted here with puy lentils and some charmingly minute steamed vegetables – zucchini in this case – and pickled pattypan squash. The latter picked up during some holiday impulse buying at a supermarket outside the nearby town of Noyon, and the jar breached for this special recreation. This dish was extremely good, though the boudin did deflate somewhat during cooking which I took to be an indictment of the particular sausage-maker’s art rather than a facet typical of blood sausages in general. Should you wish to avoid that possibility altogether though, I would certainly council frying thick slices of boudin on a hot plate, or similar device, until crispy on the outside. The contrast with the lentils and the soft interior of the sausage would be even better than what’s pictured here.

The culinary memoir has to be one of my favorite genres of both cookbooks and books in general. Combining anecdotes, family history and delicious recipes, and spanning literature and cuisine, there’s really nothing better than a cookbook that you can actually read, that’s not just a selection of quick and easy recipes by some personality-laden stand and stir TV show host, and from which you learn the context of the food and about why traditions and patience in food are important. With the holiday season upon us, I can heartily recommend you give the gift of a copy of Food & Friends: Recipes and Memories from Simca’s Cuisine by Simone Beck, to your nearest and dearest this year.

Madame Beck is best known as having been Julia Child’s collaborator on Mastering the Art of French Cooking volumes I and II, in which she was both originator and chief tester of the majority of the recipes contained therein. Beck and Child met through a mutual friend while Child was first in Paris with her spy-husband, Paul, in the late 1940s, and struck up a friendship that was to last until Beck’s death in 1991. In spite of her crucial role in these historic cookbooks, many Americans could be forgiven for never having heard of Simone Beck, since Julia Child’s television career and her bright and breezy personality are what most people remember. This is a pity because Beck is a superb raconteuse, whose life, spent in various parts of France, spanning two World Wars, a trans-Atlantic career, and the birth, life and death of nouvelle cuisine, is truly fascinating.

The first half of this reissued book – first published in 1991 – is a charming, rose-tinted memoir, interspersed at key points with beautifully-constructed period menus complete with recipes from the principal events she tells of – dinners with local Norman families, dinners for liberating Canadian soldiers, and lunches made for her Provencal cooking school. The second half is rather more of a straight-up compendium of French recipes, many of which feel, in all honesty, rather old-fashioned and frumpy when deprived of Beck’s evocative descriptions of French country life we find in the first half of the book.

If you are looking for a cookbook full of recipes that you’re immediately going to want to make, then this might not be the book for you, as although there are plenty of recipes that will make you salivate, many feel rather overly ornate for the typical American home cook. For the purposes of quality control, I tried her Poulet de Varvannes a l’estragon et a la creme (chicken in tarragon cream sauce) (recipe to follow in a later post), and found it to be not only completely delicious, but a very straightforward recipe to take on, even for a week night, so one can definitely pick through this books contents for more approachable dishes. However, even if you never make any of Simca’s food, there is plenty to enjoy in her book with its variety of delightful tales of her gastronomic pursuits and friendships with many of the 20th century’s most celebrated bon vivants. For further reading of this kind, I can also recommend Jacques Pepin’s The Apprentice, M.F.K. Fisher’s A Long Time Ago in France and the unsurpassed When French Women Cook by Madeleine Kamman.

As you may have inferred, I am not overly impressed by this show or others like Man vs. Food that marvel at just how gluttonous and boorish the host can be. Perhaps it’s because I frequently over-eat and then avoid looking at myself in the mirror, but in the same way as I don’t favor shows featuring close-ups of young fools guzzling booze, like, say, The Real World, I also don’t enjoy watching some fat guy shoving 4 pounds of pancakes down his pie-hole surrounded by the cheering obese. I find it all, shall we say, sorta gross.

On a more serious note though, if such shows are truly representative of the best road-food in this country, and were I an American truck-driver, I would fear for my health. I know from personal experience that driving isn’t one of the more healthful occupations given the innumerable sedentary hours in the cab, but when the majority of truck-stops offer only greasy fast food, you can be pretty sure that expecting to to enjoy a long and healthy retirement after 40 years in the game may be optimistic.

We mentioned our appreciation for the fare offered at Italian truck-stops a couple of years ago — noting with joy and surprise in equal measure that one can get beer or wine to accompany, amongst other things, fantastically fresh panini — but our recent trip to France has re-opened the debate over which country we’d prefer to be a trucker in.

Known as routiers, French truck-drivers have a reputation for gruffness and industrial action. Rarely a year passes in which they do not blockade the Channel Tunnel or the autoroutes around Paris with blazing oil drums to protest rising fuel prices, increased tolls, or out of sympathy with the similarly militant French farmer. Having driven in France, one sympathizes with their complaints over the miserable state of fuel and tolls, but if there is one facet of Gallic truck-driving life about which they cannot complain, it’s road food.

Perhaps to compensate the routier for his hard life behind the wheel, the weeks away from his family (and it almost always is a him), and the hours of solitude, in true French style, there has grown up a nationwide network of restaurants that principally cater to him: the Relais Routiers. The French trucker network makes sure that wherever he may find himself, from the city to the countryside, from Flanders to Gascony, the hard-working driver can get a three-course meal with wine and a shower without having to resort to such desperate measures as his American (or British) counterpart and settle for fast-food. In fact, a handy pocket-guide is published annually to help them find these often out-of-the-way places.

And therein lies the rub: rather like the average Frenchman who will happily spend an hour of his precious Sunday driving out to a tiny auberge hidden in the hills to support the cooking of a particular chef, the French truck driver will always go out of his way to arrive at a Relais Routiers around noon. And why not? They serve excellent, often regional, food at the correct price that has him returning every time he’s passing by.

But to many throughout the provinces of France, the Relais Routiers are more than just a truck-stop. They are the local restaurant, watering-hole, social club and informal town hall — the locus for ties that bind the community together. And like local businesses everywhere, owners of Relais Routiers know their clientele well enough to understand that their customer’s loyalty to a restaurant is only as strong as its loyalty is to their stomachs and pocket-books. Consequently, they offer reliably good, honest food. Indeed, in these thin times, and with the advent of so many pretentious, expensive eateries causing the collapse of local bistrots across France, some commentators have called Relais Routiers the guardians of the nation’s cuisine. This might be slightly unfair to the Paul Bocuses and Daniel Bouluds of this world, but like a good pub in Britain or quality diner in America, you simply know where you are with a Routiers. You know what to expect and while your expectations might rarely be exceeded, they are always met, and familiarity and comfort are what most people seek most of the time.

Until comparatively recently, the laws governing alcohol consumption and driving in France were less than strict, and it was perfectly normal for a routier to wash his three course meal down with an aperitif, half a bottle of wine and a digestif (all except the digestif being included in the price) before breezily climbing back into the cab of his 10 ton machine and trundling off. These days the carte routiers still includes three (sometimes four!) generous courses, but with the booze sensibly capped at a 1/3 bottle, often served in a small jug that looks touchingly dainty in the nicotine-stained hands of blue-chinned trucker.

When we visited Auberge St. Martin — a Relais Routiers on the RN31 in Pontarcher, Ambleny, between Compiègne and Soissons in the Oise department of France between Christmas and New Years — our delicious three course lunch and half-carafe of house red plus coffee set us back an astonishing 22 euros ($29) for the two of us. The charge of one euro above that levied on many of our fellow diners was due to our inability to flash our routiers membership card.

The Carte Routiers had its customary three options that day, a choice of two starters, two mains and two desserts: a charcuterie plate (containing slices of the local specialty, andouillette, or tripe sausage) or pork rillettes, followed by poulet Basquaise (Basque-style chicken with peppers and onions in a spicy sauce) or biftek (rump steak with french fries), and fromage blanc (a delicious thick natural yogurt) or assiette de fromage (cheese plate) for dessert.

The food was simple and delicious, and the service prompt and informal. The sole problem we encountered was in following directions to the bathroom which appeared to lead to the bar, but in fact directed you outside to a separate door where the shower was located. The most enlightening aspect of the whole experience — quite apart from note penned on the menu listing a shower for 2 euro or 3 euro with a towel — was that this place really did a lot of its business with truck drivers. Outside, packed tightly together on the muddy verges of a country road were 10 or more giant trucks, and glancing around us more than half the diners were sitting quietly by themselves, sleeves rolled up to reveal a bevy of tattoos, breaking their midday bread in companionable silence. We looked at each other and both said, almost simultaneously, “this would never happen in America.” It was a moment of sincere cultural recognition on our behalf, and we raised our glasses to toast these heroes of haulage and their continuing role as custodians of the nation’s table.

In the tiny Cheshire hamlet of Lower Peover (pronounced “peever”) is the delightfully rustic country pub “The Bells”, so-called because one has to literally walk around it to get to the parish church. In fact, so aligned are church and boozer that the two are separated by only fifty feet of graveyard, a low gate and a tall hedge, with the path from the church door leading directly into the pub — demonstrating the weighty tithe rural folk feel to both institutions.

I worked there as a barman in my youth, and over the course of my employment became, as barmen often do, intimate with many of the regulars, who, for the most part, were local farmers and laborers. Every day, at no later than 11.30 a.m., these ruddy-faced gents would pause outside and wash their heavily-calloused hands in the moss-rimmed trough, before propping themselves up at the bar and grunting hellos to each other. Whether their usual was a simple pint of “best”, a black n’tan, a “brown over bitter”, or a pint of “Chinese”, I’d spy them washing-up, and have it ready for them when they walked in. And, though I learned a great deal about their home-lives from their daily grousings — the damp weather affecting their strawberries, the disappointment over their older son’s desire to become a club-singer instead of a pig farmer — I never met or even saw their wives, about whom they grumbled most often. Probably because these tyrannical-sounding women were at home cooking the stout lunch their husbands’ would need if they were to remain erect at the wheel of their tractors after several noontime ales.

Europhile Pretensions Beyond My Station
In fact, the realm of the rural pub, during the daytime at least, was almost an entirely male domain. With the occasional exception of the vicar’s wife popping in mid-afternoon to admonish the regulars about their poor Sunday attendance over “half” a lager and lime, it was only in the evening that the women-folk from thereabouts came in to whet their whistles. And their whistles were whet on a peculiarly vocational basis, with the village shop-workers, almost exclusively, drinking shandies or halves of lager (with or without lime), and the professional and retired classes opting for gin and tonic, or Dubonnet and bitter lemon. The general sense — daytime or evening — seemed to be that real country people drank only beer, whereas effete, French cordials were either for “nancy boys” or the haughty, upper classes with pretensions of continental sophistication.

Being “in” with the regulars, I managed to convince myself that I, quite contrary to my middle-class upbringing, was a stalwart of the working class — even punctuating my, hitherto, mostly uncorrupted English with all kinds of full-bodied rural idioms like, “down at Jim’s mother’s” (somewhere a long way away), “coming down like cow’s piss” (heavy rain), and “‘e couldn’t stop a pig in an entry!” (describing a bow-legged person, of whom there are plenty in rural Cheshire) — and so developed an accompanying disdain for Dubonnet, without ever even having tasted it.

Made Famous by Legionnaires, Royalty
In fact, I shouldn’t have been concerned that enjoying an occasional chilled Dubonnet before dinner would impinge upon my undoubtedly macho self-image, for the drink was introduced in 1846 as the winner of a competition seeking to find effective ways of getting the famously tough soldiers of France’s Foreign Legion to take their quinine. As with several other notable aperitifs, including Kina Lillet and Fernet-Branca, Dubonnet began life as a medicinal beverage that, using fortified wine as its base, combined herbs, berries, spices and peels into a palatable mixture.

For evidence of it credentials as a nostrum, one has to look no further than the British royal family, the Windsors, whose longevity, at least on the maternal side, can be credited to regular libations of Dubonnet. It’s well-known that Her Majesty the late Queen Mother was a devotee of gin — famously having badly scalded her lower half in the bathtub after one too many — but she was also a regular on the Dubonnet, which she liked to drink in a 30/70 ratio with gin and a slice of lemon under the ice. So committed to this was Her Majesty, that she once noted before leaving the UK on a trip abroad, “…I think that I will take two small bottles of Dubonnet and gin with me this morning, in case it is needed…” Similarly, her daughter, the reigning Queen, Elizabeth II, is rumored to take a daily Dubonnet and gin before lunch. Royalty, you see, doesn’t have to work in the afternoons.

The Multi-Colored Belle of the Bar
As we have seen, preparations for Dubonnet abound, including with bitter lemon and with gin, but there are a myriad others, and Dubonnet features in literally hundreds of cocktails the world over. Perhaps this is because it, like Lillet, comes in more than one color — three, in fact — though, in the United States, only two are generally available — white and red, with the latter being by far the most common and widely used. The gold variety can occasionally be found behind cocktail bars of quality.

Now, because it’s red, Dubonnet Rouge adds a certain drama to any cocktail, and can therefore be used in place of Cointreau and cranberry juice in a Cosmopolitan, instead of the sweet Vermouth in a Manhattan, or in place of Campari in an Americano. However, that shouldn’t suggest it is nothing more than a colorant. Dubonnet Rouge can quite easily be the prinicipal in many cocktails, including the fabulously-named Smoking Cat, amongst others. The similarly aromatic Blanc is often used as a substitute for dry Vermouth, in famous cocktails like the Martini, Rob Roy, and the superbly-titled Creole Scream.

Marxist vs. Gastronomic Class-Struggle
If the regulars at the Bells were right, and you are what you drink, then I am, in all honesty, an arriviste, petit-bourgeois Englishman from the provinces with pretensions of epicurean sophistication. I am, I realize, far more closely aligned with the mixed-drink sippers than the hearty beer-drinking peasants of my former place of work. I hereby confess that I enjoy nothing more than an aperitif of Dubonnet rouge over ice and garnished with a slice of orange, as I contemplate the arrival of a savory bistrot luncheon. Similarly, my predilections are more inclined towards a glass of Dubonnet blanc with ice and a slice of lemon ahead of a sole meuniere than two or three pints of best bitter and a plate of Irish stew. Does the fact that my tastebuds contradict my ancestry and upbringing make me a traitor to my class and a bad person? Okay, don’t answer that. Instead, you should give either color of Dubonnet a try in whichever preparation you find most suitable to your sense of self and class identity.

L’Express Chicken Liver Pate with Pistachios

L’Express – Fish Soup

L’Express – Toulouse Sausages with Potato and Braised Brussel Sprouts

L’Express Steak Tartare with Frites

Listen to the podcast Montreal Food Scene. Listen to the podcast Montreal Food Scene

For this month’s drink, I considered writing about several summer classics, and was nearly persuaded that a paean to my proletarian love — cold beer — might suffice in both the “pure sunshine in a glass” sense, and because it’s typically my leading beverage in terms of volume consumed between June and September.

The problem with writing about beer though, is that everybody knows what it is and in order to be at all original you have to search for some obscure brand made in some far-flung part of the world in order to keep the reader interested, and even then, it might be a struggle. So I’m leaving that thorny problem for another month when I’m feeling particularly inspired.

Whereas beer, in all its forms, is a year-round drink that can be enjoyed as readily on a frosty January evening, as well as in the shade of a palm tree, the subject of this month’s DOTM can only really be drunk in the summer. Or at least, it is to me one of the quintessential tastes of the summer. I’m talking about the fantastically unique aperitif that is pastis.

I forget when I had my first pastis, but I very much doubt I was above the legal drinking age. My mother used to order one occasionally when we were on holiday in the south of France, and as a lifelong fan of all things licorice and anise/aniseed flavored I probably found the aroma coming from her glass irresistible, and waiting until my parents were distracted, I suspect I took my first sip.

And ever since, the sight of a glass, perhaps a third-full with yellowish-grey pastis and a solitary cube of ice next to a sweating pitcher of water, never fails to remind me of summer holidays, of warm flagstone terraces under my feet and the hum of cicadas in the bushes.

It’s certainly an evocative memory and it (mostly) prevents me from drinking pastis during weather that necessitates wearing shoes or socks. To me, pastis simply connotes relaxation and warm summer evenings, and it seems I’m not alone. In his second book about his adopted region, Toujours Provence, all-around Francophile author Peter Mayle says that he cannot imagine drinking pastis in a hurry. “There has to be heat and sunlight and the illusion the clock has stopped.” Now, few of us are lucky enough to be able to enjoy our pastis with a view of Mount Ventoux and fragrant fields of lavender swaying into the distance as he describes, but I think the recipe for enjoying pastis is one that can travel given the right weather and the right attitude.

In the US, pastis is fairly easy to find. Almost all decent French bistro(t)s sell it, or at least, have a bottle of it behind the bar, and are most likely to stock one or both the two most popular brands in France: Pernod and Ricard. However, and perhaps owing to the fact that it’s not that popular over here, few places really know how to serve pastis properly. I remember one time not long ago at a restaurant near us in Brooklyn, being given a 12 ounce glass of pastis, being charged $5 for it, and barely managing to make it through the ensuing meal without falling off my chair. Pastis, you see, is 45% alcohol and should always be diluted.

A Little History
And, interestingly, the alcohol content has a lot to do with the rise in the popularity of pastis. At the end of the 19th century, absinthe was very popular, but being distilled from wormwood and wine must to around the 68% mark, it was hallucinogenic, addictive and dangerous – Van Gogh is reputed to have cut off his ear and Verlaine to have shot Rimbaud while under its influence — and so in 1915 it was made illegal.

Owner of an absinthe distillery, Jules Pernod decided to move with the times and adapted his ingredient from wormwood to the widely available and legal anise with immediate success. Paul Ricard, though, was a relative late-comer to the business when he launched his own brand in 1932. However, Ricard had a knack for promotion and subtitled his drink le vrai pastis de Marseille, or the true pastis of Marseille, giving it at once a raffish, slightly exotic, association that has had it flying off the shelves in the northern parts of France and Europe ever since. A Marsellais is known around France to be something of a blageur, an exaggerator, liberal with the truth, and this combined with the city’s salty reputation and soupy patois, lend Ricard a quality that encourages the drinker to adopt the habits of that part of the country, pastis in hand. Indeed, Ricard’s pastis is so synonymous with the city that he has a racing circuit at Castoullet, just outside Marseille, named for him – le Circuit Paul Ricard, though it is highly recommended that those partaking of his beverage do not attempt to reach racing speeds on any kind of machinery…

How to Drink Pastis
Find yourself a warm evening and somewhere to sit outside. Remove shoes and socks and place feet on warm ground. Now, take a high-balls glass and pour in a generous shot of whichever brand of pastis you like. [If you’re visiting France, there are many small local brands to choose from depending on where you are, so why not try one you’ve not seen before?] Then fill the glass up to about ¾ full with cold water and watch the pastis change from thick and yellow (or slightly green in the case of Pernod) to a milky pastel, then add a couple of lumps of ice to fill it up to the top. Then, enjoy.

For many, the taste is too licoricey, but I happen to love licorice and the extra licoricey aroma that the star anise gives it. I also love the change in color and the fact that you can re-dilute your pastis once you’ve drunk it down a ways, to extend it and, perhaps, sober up a bit. I also love the way pastis gives you a roaring appetite. It’s probably the best aperitif for that this side of a dirty vodka martini, and enjoyed with bare feet and the sun sinking into the horizon, it never fails to engender relaxation ahead of a meal eaten outside surrounded by the noises and aromas of summer.

Try it with a bowl of tapenade, good olive oil and some rounds of crusty bread, and you’re set for the beginning of a great meal. Vive l’ete!

Check out these other posts you may enjoy:

• Drink of the Month: SOJU (April, 2008)
• Drink of the Month – May: Vin Santo
• In Defence of Sandwiches (White House Subs, Atlantic City)
• European Roast…? (Why Coffee Taste Better There)
• PROVENCAL RABBIT WITH OLIVES AND CAPERS
• SANDWICH DE MERGUEZ (BAGUETTE FILLED WITH MERGUEZ SAUSAGE, FRENCH FRIES AND FRIED LEEKS)

A few summers ago we were very fortunate to spend a long vacation traveling through northern Spain and southwestern France. It was our first real vacation alone since Amy and I had met, and was especially well-deserved because we had spent the previous 12 months going through the traumatic process of immigrating me to the United States and all the crap that goes along with moving to a new country and finding gainful employment. Even now, after ten or more trips overseas in the interim, we still look back on that wonderful trip with great nostalgia. In fact, so formative was it for us and our relationship together, that we might not be so passionate about food (or even have this blog) were it not for having driven those rural highways and byways eating and drinking our way through the small towns of Spain and France. So this post and podcast are a sort of belated paen to the mental tranquility we rediscovered on that trip.

As we planned it, we read-up on destinations en route from Barcelona to Bilbao and decided that Carcassonne should be amongst them. Quite apart from its culinary pedigree of being one of the three towns in that part of France which lay claim to having been the birthplace of the famous pork and bean dish cassoulet, it also, reputedly, has the best Bastille Day firework display anywhere in the country outside Paris. Judge for yourself in the video below.

Bastille Day or Fête de la Fédération (July 14th), is the French equivalent of the American Independence Day, and marks the storming and fall of the Bastille (Paris’ central prison where French political prisoners and fictional characters, including Dumas’ The Man In the Iron Mask were imprisoned) during the French Revolution that signified the ‘birth of the modern French nation’. It’s the biggest national holiday in France with celebrations and demonstrations of fidelity to La Patrimonie all over the country.

However, like many national holidays around the world, in spite of the ostensible patriotism of the day, good food, amazing fireworks and fun, drunk times are the thing that most people focus on. So, to line our stomachs before a night of drinking wine out of the bottle on the street (like everyone else), we, almost like Moses in the wilderness, followed the pillar of smoke towards the heady smell of grilled meat. There we found a lined, toothless, Algerian man, squinting against the smoke and spitting fat of his blackened grill, cooking huge merguez sausages (a spicy North African sausage made with beef or lamb) over hot coals. In exchange for a couple of euros, he nestled a couple of these sausages snugly into a crusty baguette alongside a load of salty, golden french fries, and smeared the whole thing with dijon mustard and ketchup. That’s what I call street food!

The sandwich is exactly what you’d imagine, and after a couple of drinks, it’s even better. The spiciness of the merguez along with the salty, crispy french fries, well, it just doesn’t get any better. We’re not actually going to post a recipe for this one, only a quick pictorial step-by-step below – you’ll have to listen to the podcast for a detailed how to – but anyone with half a brain (and we firmly believe our readers are in possession of somewhat more than that) should be able to make their own sandwich de merguez with ease. As you can see from the photos, we added some fried leeks as a topping in what can only be described as a petty bourgeois touch, which the French revolutionaries of old would certainly have disproved of, but that’s freedom for you, right? In a similarly middle-class stylie (or sans culottes for those of you who’ve fought your way through Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen), we attempted to make our own version of a harissa sauce, combining ketchup, 1 clove of roasted garlic, 1 fire-roasted habanero (yes, the sauce was a f***in’ wildman), and a pinch or less of ground coriander, cumin, mustard powder, black pepper and kosher salt in a food processor, but you could use dijon mustard and ketchup as your condiments, as we did that hallowed night in Carcassonne. Enjoy the sandwich whenever you like, but why not give it a try during the next national holiday wherever you are. After all, you don’t have to be French to appreciate spicy sausages and fries in a crusty roll!

Thanks to Zach at Serious Eats for featuring this sandwich in his weekly Serious Sandwiches column. THANK YOU!

SANDWICH DE MERGUEZ – A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

1. Grill some merguez sausages on an indoor or outdoor grill.

2. Thinly slice some leeks.

3. Toss thinly sliced leeks in 2 tablespoons of flour PLUS 2 tablespoons cornstarch and fry in some veggie oil for about 1 minute.

4. Thinly slice 2 or 3 potatoes.

5. Heat up some vegetable oil and double fry your thin-sliced potatoes until golden brown. Allow to drain on some paper towels and sprinkle with salt.

6. In a fresh baguette, brush some dijon and spicy ketchup on each side of the bread. Add your grilled sausages, nestle some french fries between the sausages and the bread and then top with some fried leeks. ENJOY and feel free to keep dipping sandwich in some more mustard and ketchup.