Sausage soup

Last week, I experienced my first bona fide cooking disaster. Luckily the meal did not need to be ready for another 24 hours or so, so I had time to clean up, regroup, and try again.

The day started out like any other. Louis invited some guests for dinner. We discussed what to make/eat and decided it would be best to keep things simple. A few hours later, I had come up with a menu that would help us get through these gray, dreary, and dark Parisian winter days: sausage soup, baked mac & cheese, and challah (our guests were bringing dessert). Simple? Not really. But we're nothing if not contradictory.

This post is going to focus on the sausage soup. Why? Because it really deserves its own place in the history of our year in Paris.

The soup recipe came from my all-time favorite food/photography website, Smitten Kitchen. Actually, all of the recipes for this meal came from her site. I want to be her friend, mostly so that I can play with her oh-so-cute just-born baby.

For now, though, I will just have to be content borrowing all of her recipes and drooling over her photography. This recipe (it's here, if you want to try it yourself!) called for some kind of pre-cooked spicy sausage, like linguica (oh how I miss the Neighborhood) or chorizo. Luckily, we're living in Paris, where they don't have any of that fancy stuff. Naively, I set out to find some "pre-cooked spicy sausage" without my dictionary (or Louis). If I were going to go back in time, this is about the moment where I would go and shake myself, screaming "wait!"

I went up the street to our local tripier. [Wikipedia translates the page about triperie (in French it's both the product and the place where you buy it), thusly: "Tripe is a type of edible offal from the stomachs of various farm animals." Hmm... if I had read that (or re-read this) before I left the house, I probably would have avoided the place.]

Nevertheless, when I walked in, I saw sausage links on high and figured I'd be able to find what I needed. In hindsight, I didn't really even know what I needed. Was I looking for saucisse? Saucisson? And what's the difference anyway? Apparently, I'm not the only American in Paris with this question. And even now, after a bit of post-traumatic-cooking-experience research, I'm still not sure what the difference is, or even if knowing the difference would have helped me in this situation.

I bought two links of a sausage that smelled deliciously strong and even thought to ask the tripier if it was already cooked. Except I didn't really ask if it was already cooked, I asked if it was again cooked. We've been in Paris now for over three months, so perhaps I should be somewhat proud that a linguistic error with ramifications of this magnitude hadn't yet occurred. Again cooked? What does that even mean? Well, I think my tripier friend thought I was asking how such a sausage could be prepared. He proceeded to describe all the ways I could eat my sausage: spread it on toasts, warm it and eat it with cheese, and various other preparations. I smiled, took my change and my sausages, and walked out.

Back at home, I proceeded to prepare my ingredients: onions, sweet potato, regular potato, white beans, and sausage! Except that the recipe told me to slice my sausage, and my sausage would not allow itself to be sliced. No worries, I thought, I've eaten sausage in chunks before. I'll just remove the thick, waxy casing and form the sausage into cute little globs of goodness.

I heated up a little oil in the pot, and plopped in the sausages, preparing to brown them as directed. Immediately, I detected a problem. First, the sausage did not smell good. Not at all. Second, the sausage wasn't so much browning as blackening. A few minutes in, I knew that this sausage was not going to fulfill my needs for this soup. Perplexed, I laid the remains to rest and took a moment to say goodbye:

I knew I needed to obtain some new sausage, but certainly didn't want to face the shame of going back to the triperie. Thankfully, because this is Paris, there is no shortage of meat-vendors in the immediate vicinity.

I headed out to a boucherie/charcuterie nearby, armed with my arsenal of meat-specific vocabulary: piquant (spicy), saucisse (sausage), saucisson (sausage), déjà (already), poîle (pan), soupe (soup). I stumbled through the ordering, and after much debate (between le boucher and la charcutière (they both seemed to think the other had what I wanted), between me and la charcutière (she epitomized the Parisian saying "the customer is annoying and wasting my time")), I ended up with exactly what I needed:

In the end, I learned a valuable lesson: sausage and sweet potato soup is an excellent salve for le blues hivernal, the dastardly French language, surly Parisian shopkeepers, and uncooperative meat products. I will most definitely make it again.