Saucisson Stories: Connection over Cured Meats

by Gisele Weishan (Australia)

Making a local connection Belgium

I’d never been an avid meat eater. Granted I enjoyed the occasional steak, but growing up with a vegetarian mother, my diet had been more green than lean. When I went to live in the small French town of Sedan, however, this would not do. Sedan, with its population of 208 inhabitants, is really more of a long road cut through an expanse of French fields and forest pine than a town in and of itself. Most time is not actually spent in one’s own “town” but rather driving to others in the surrounding region. During my stay I lived with a family of seven, a reconstructed patchwork home sewn together by a widower of three and a widow of two. They’d often drive us across the Belgian border, on which Sedan sat, to visit their old family friend, the butcher with a cheery smile and beer bellied stomach. Within the small Belgian town, his butchery was not just the only place to buy assorted cured meats, it was an institution. It had spent decades trading in the food stuff that would go into the everyday Frenchman’s morning baguette, that would fill his children’s stomachs after a long day of school and that would offer them all reassuring meaty reprieve from the bitter cold of an otherwise white wonderland winter. What I mean to say is that in France, charcuterie is an invaluable currency and this butcher, who at that moment stood at the pristine silver meat slicer carving out smoked flanks in a kind celebratory gesture to mark my arrival to his country and the beginning of what would be our three month acquaintanceship, controlled its monopoly. In my three months stay, much of my time was spent in that butchery or otherwise surrounded by its products. From the hunt we went to to purchase game, me and my five host-siblings sitting unbelted in the back of his van on crates stocked with fresh produce playing at pushing one another from side to side at every turn of the winding road, to the many meals eaten over cold meats. On calls back to my mother, I often recounted tales of warm crusty bread cracked over stench-inducing cheese, picturesque morning meadow sunrises in the background outside our window, and saved the ham, saucisson sec and Sopressata to myself. When I first arrived, I’d been apprehensive to dig into the daily buffet, a daunting task, of meat and cheese and bread. Quickly, though, I learned how refusing a butcher’s platter was rather akin to spitting on the altar, a wholly sacrilegious act. The food, delicious as it was, was rather more than just daily nourishment, meals there served a deeper purpose as conduits to flickers of genuine connection, rest and reflection which offered me an insight into the country I’d voyaged to on a level I had not anticipated, especially not as the result of salami. Thus an acceptance of someone’s ham, was a silent acknowledgement of the stories that would be shared over that meal, and in participating in eating, one was really showing their willingness to participate in connecting. Over meals, in between bites, when mouths weren't filled with food, they let out other things. Stories. It was over a plate of Prosciutto, for example, that my host-mother recounted the time she’d come home to find her husband on the kitchen floor. Over a bowl of Bresaola, that my host-father recounted the struggles and joys he’d faced with his wife and her illness. Over a spread of Speck, that the butcher spoke of his own ailments. Even strangers, who’d just popped into the butcher for a quick kilo of Jambon de Bayonne would be ushered into the kitchen to recount their day over a steaming mug of coffee before indeed departing with their intended purchase at least forty minutes later. When I finally left, I found that Sedan was indeed a town after all. I saw now how it was bigger than it had first appeared to me, bigger for the people I had come to know, for the stories I had come to hear… Bigger like a satisfied stomach after just one more platter of fresh charcuterie.