LIMOGES, France — While the French may be renowned for their refined culinary tastes, they have another side. It was on full display last week in this city in central France known for its expensive porcelain but with another side of its own.
Limoges is also a city of butchers, and their annual festival, La Frairie des Petits Ventres, or The Brotherhood of Small Bellies, is a faithand-food-based celebration of what Christine Travers delicately terms “products that we could never find in supermarkets.”
The festival was created with the idea of building interest in the meat products consumed by peasants in much older days, including the organs of lamb, veal and pigs.
The one-day festival starts in the morning with an openair market, and closes in the evening with a religious procession. It is the excellence of the tripe that attracts hundreds of food lovers to the narrow Rue de la Boucherie, or butcher’s street, a picturesque medieval lane lined with half-timbered houses.
Lured by the powerful smell of grilled pig, visitors strolled along the butchers’ stalls in search of “grillons,” grilled pig fat, or an “andouillette” sandwich made of a cooked sausage with veal or pork intestines and onions.
In the street, butchers fried the offerings in deep, heavy pans, often under the visitors’ expectant gaze; many, like Francois Brun, proudly showed off their original tripe-based creations. Brun’s “nez d’amour,” or “nose of love,” is an elaborate assemblage of boned and cooked pig snout stuffed with pig tongue and vegetables.
“There aren’t any kebabs here!” said Michel Toulet, the director of Renaissance du Vieux Limoges, the group that organizes the event. “Here, we have cider, we have beer from the Limousin region. It’s only local products, and we care about it.”
Liliane Guedon, 69, a retired teacher and adventurous food lover, comes here every year to buy girot, a sausage of dried lamb’s blood sold only for the occasion.
“It’s very special,” she said. “Some say it’s tasteless, but I find it very fine.”
The Frairie des Petits Ventres was created in 1973 by Renaissance du Vieux Limoges, an association of preservationists and butchers who came together successfully to fight plans to demolish the old city center.
The butchers showed their commitment, they said, by putting up stalls outside their shops to sell cooked innards and local specialties. The Frairie des Petits Ventres quickly became a local institution.
Even shop owners along Rue de la Boucherie, including a notions store, a beauty salon and an antiques store, turned themselves into butcher shops for the day, swapping their balls of knitting wool, day creams and old books for blood sausages, veal heads and pigs’ feet.
“Our neighborhood is unique,” said Genevieve Mausset-Cibot, the senior butcher from an ancient butchers’ family. “So we had to revive the old trade and show another way to sell our products.”
Butchers have a long and important history here, often overshadowing the local nobility in power and prestige. They established a powerful medieval guild, and legend has it that they grew so wealthy that they lent money to the kings. When King Henry IV visited Limoges in the 17th century, he was greeted by a delegation of butchers, as was President Francois Mitterrand in 1982.
Guilds were outlawed in 1789, but in 1887 they formed the Brotherhood of Saint-Aurelien, named after the butchers’ patron saint, which was nearly as exclusive. Until the 1960s, the brotherhood granted memberships only to Roman Catholic male butchers, their sons or sons-in-law.
“The butchers were tied to each other by marriage,” said Jean Parot, a member of one of the city’s oldest families of butchers. They have three bonds, he said: family, profession and religion. “They married each other, they were all butchers and they were all Catholics.”
The butchers also entered the city’s public institutions, and some of them still have their coats of arms engraved on the front of the butcher’s chapel, known formally as Notre Dame des Petits Ventres.
The tiny 15th-century church, nicknamed the butchers’ chapel, shelters a curious stone sculpture, depicting the Virgin Mary giving the baby Jesus what is said to be a kidney. It is known as La Vierge au Rognon, the Virgin of the kidney.
Monique Boulestin, a local Socialist Party legislator, said that the fair, religious and pagan, was unusual in France. “It is a curious celebration based on devotion to the saints, in a land that is profoundly secular,” she said.
Religion, Pages 32 on 10/28/2010