Vintage sausages

We dropped by J.C. the butcher the other day and picked up a couple of steaks and my brisket, weighing in at 3 kilos. This being France we also got a nice bottle of Bordeaux wine for free, which I always consider a bonus. So this weekend will be my first experiment in barbecuing a brisket, which seems to be the holy grail of low and slow BBQ, so that will interesting. I'm still not sure if I'm going to spend X amount of hours on it and the end result will be "meh" or not, but that's why I'm doing it.

We then stopped by E & J, who are the nice old couple that we buy eggs and chickens from, and picked up two capons. I've recently read somewhere that creating capons are illegal in England nowadays, but it seems like there is a big loophole for that since you can simply import them instead. Yay! for toothless laws. Anyway, you can't visit someone and not have some snacks while you're there, and snacks make you dry in the mouth so you simply have to have some wine, and... Yep, life's hard here in France. So we sat around the table and discussed ... sausages. Yep, life's wild here in France. They put sausage after sausage on the table, all were home dried but some where only three weeks old, others were almost a year old and the pièce de résistance was a big jar filled with oil and sausages who had been submerged in there for more than two years. Comparing them all I think that the taste became wider(?) the older the sausage was, but that's probably nothing that we could tell if we didn't have all of them to compare. Seeing how much sausages, mushrooms and frozen animals they had more or less everywhere in the house, we asked them for how long they thought they would survive without going shopping. Around two years apparently. So when the war comes, we'll bring our tent.

But an interesting thing is that we've tried to explain a few times that they have so much knowledge when it comes to food, and that there are actually lots of big city people who would pay money to be able to take part in turning a live pig into lots of jars, fillets and sausages, but for them it's like "everybody knows how to do that, so why would anyone be interested"? But fingers crossed that we've managed to talk our way into the next time they get a pig.