🇫🇷 France · Family: Plat-en-Sandwich · Region: Lyon · Bread: baguette · Proteins: pork
Ingredients
Eaten standing up, with a glass of something cold, this is pork cracklings in bread as a bar puts them out: the distinction is the setting it is built for. These grattons are the Lyonnais charcuterie-shop kind, pork pieces fried in their own fat until brittle and deep brown, sold by weight at the counter. Pressed onto split bread, often with nothing else, they are the snack a Lyon bar puts out to go with a drink rather than a sit-down lunch. The region is Lyon, and the form is the bouchon-and-counter habit of eating charcuterie by the handful.
The build follows the room it lives in. A bar snack has to be eaten one-handed while standing, so the bread is a short split length, the grattons are scattered rather than stacked, and the rendered pork fat is the only binder needed. The crust has to be firm enough to push back against the crackle, because the whole appeal is the resistance of the pieces against a soft crumb. The cure is salty and direct, which is the design: a glass cuts the fat, so the sandwich does not have to. It is best within a few minutes of being made, before the fat softens the crust and the grattons give up their snap.
Variations stay inside the Lyonnais counter habit. The same bread carries a thick-cut rosette, the slow-cured sausage of the city, or a spoon of the soft Saint-Marcellin laid alongside, each a swap of one counter staple for another with the standing-up format held constant. The Sandwich aux Grattons Lyonnais belongs with the dishes the catalog groups under Plat-en-Sandwich, the regional specialties folded into bread. Its specific contribution is the bar register: a crackling sandwich built to be eaten on its feet, with a glass, not at a table.
More from this family
Other Plat-en-Sandwich sandwiches in France: