Sandwich Sarthois

At a locomotive servicing stop on the Paris-Brest line in 1900, a charcutier in Connerré named Albert Lhuissier handed a length of baguette spread thick with his own pork rillettes through the open window of a stopped train, and the passenger ate it leaning out over the platform. That is the working scene the sandwich came out of, and the working scene most Sarthois will name when asked. The Sandwich Sarthois is the pale, fat-rich pork spread of the département pressed into the crumb of a long loaf, eaten one-handed, with a cornichon if the eater asks for one and almost nothing else if he does not. The département built a hand-held lunch out of a slow-cooked Sunday plate.

The spread is the sandwich. Coarsely cut pork shoulder, sometimes worked with ham and lard together, is salted, cooked four to six hours in its own fat in a heavy copper or cast-iron pot, and worked at the end of the cook with a wooden spatula until the strands separate into long fibres held in a translucent fat. The Sarthois style of the spread, traditionally made in Connerré, runs paler than the Touraine version: the cook stops the pot before the strands brown, so the rillettes set a pale gold rather than the deeper bronze the Touraine kitchen prefers. A spoonful is worked into a split baguette while the bread is still soft from the morning bake, and the loaf comes out gold-tinted and weighted with fat.

The build hides three quiet ways of failing. Rillettes cold from the case spread reluctantly and tear the crumb open as the cook works the spoon. Rillettes too warm slick straight through the bread and onto the wrapper. A loaf whose crust is too soft folds under the weight and the bread pulls itself apart with the first bite; a hard-crusted country loaf shreds the roof of the mouth before the soft inside can absorb the fat. The Sarthois cook learns to time the spread to the bread, the spread loose enough to take the crumb cleanly, the bread firm enough to carry the load without surrendering.

Open one wrapped in butcher's paper and the smell is straight pork fat, soft and a little smoky from the long simmer, with a thread of black pepper rising over the top. The crust gives without much resistance under the load it carries. Inside the loaf the spread is cool and yielding, the strands long enough to chew, the fat coating the tongue with the slow-cooked sweetness of pork shoulder before the meat itself lands. A cornichon, if the eater set one in the loaf, cracks against the back of the bite and lifts the fat with a sharp pulse of vinegar. A Sarthois drinks a cidre brut alongside, or in winter a glass of the Loir's red Jasnières.

The Sarthe takes the spread as a regional emblem and orders it with regional grammar. At a Connerré charcutier the slate writes rillettes du Mans by the half pot and rillettes en sandwich by the loaf; the customer who asks for them nature is signalling no mustard, no cornichon, no leaf, the spread carrying the whole sandwich on its own. At a stand at the Printemps des Rillettes, the annual spring festival the local brotherhood runs in Connerré, the sandwich is sold in halves and quarters by competing local charcutiers tasting their pots against one another. A regular orders by the maker's name rather than by the product, asking for du Lhuissier or de chez Prunier instead of for rillettes tout court.

Variations stay inside the spread itself. A finer grind, almost a paste, reads tighter on the crumb; a coarser grind, with visible strands and small cubes of meat, eats heartier and rougher. A heavier dose of black pepper deepens the savoury edge; a touch of clove appears in some Connerré recipes and disappears in others. The neighbouring department's reading is the Sandwich Rillettes de Tours, which runs darker and chunkier and carries the European PGI seal the Sarthois version is still pursuing. The catalog records the pure product under its own name as the Sandwich Rillettes du Mans. The Sarthois is the same spread in a regional sandwich frame, drinking cider or Jasnières instead of the Vouvray a Tours sandwich would be paired with.

The train, the charcutier, and the PGI still pending

Rabelais recorded the spread in print in the early sixteenth century. In his Gargantua of 1534 the author of Pantagruel called rillettes brune confiture de cochon, brown pig jam, the earliest French literary attestation of the preparation. The recipe itself is older than Rabelais and crosses the Sarthe-Touraine border without a single founding kitchen: pork in fat cooked down to a spread is the household preservation method of the whole lower Loire basin from the late medieval period.

The modern Sarthois reading begins with Connerré and the railway. In 1900 Albert Lhuissier bought a beverage shop in Connerré, north-east of Le Mans on the Paris-Brest line, and converted it into a charcuterie; the Paris-Brest locomotive servicing stop at Connerré required water, and passengers who walked the platform during the layover became Lhuissier's first market for rillettes sold in earthenware pots and on lengths of bread. The shop became a factory in 1913; Connerré stabilised as the Sarthe's rillettes capital in the same decade.

The département organised its rillettes brotherhood after the post-war regional-food revival. The Confrérie des Chevaliers des Rillettes Sarthoises was founded in 1968 at Mamers and runs the national rillettes competition the first Saturday of February each year. The dossier for an EU Protected Geographical Indication, opened with the INAO and approved at the French level in October 2014, is still working its way through the European Commission process; the Sarthois rillettes, unlike the Tourangeau rillettes that received their PGI on 15 November 2013, hold no European seal yet. The Sarthois claim rests for now on the Connerré shop Albert Lhuissier opened in 1900.