Sandwich Saucisse de Morteau

A small wooden peg juts from one end of the casing, and that peg names the sausage before a knife touches it. It is the cheville, the maker's mark of the saucisse de Morteau, and it once carried the sausage on its hook inside the smokehouse. The Morteau is the broad sausage of the Franche-Comté, roughly forty millimetres across and twenty centimetres long, straight rather than curled, sealed at the pegged end and tied with string at the other. Its pork is ground coarse, near eight millimetres, seasoned with little beyond pepper, and cold-smoked at length over conifer wood until the casing turns dark and the interior firms dense. It is cooked fully before bread enters the picture. The sandwich keeps everything else minimal: a split crusted loaf, a scrape of butter, thick warm coins of Morteau laid down the crumb.

Smoke is the entire register here. The pork is coarse and fatty, and that fat is the carrier; the long conifer cure is the voice riding on top of it, resinous and deep, the dominant note in every bite. Because the grind is coarse, each cut coin shows visible flecks of meat and fat and lands as a substantial, defined mouthful. The casing is broad, so three or four thick coins fill the bread and the sandwich is stacked sparingly: every slice already carries weight. The whole thing reads dense and emphatic, smoke leading and salt close on its heels.

The build punishes specific mistakes. Cut a Morteau straight from the fridge and the chilled fat sets to a hard wax, the smoke flattens, and the coin clenches instead of relaxing onto the crumb; the slicing has to happen warm, off a sausage cooked right through, so the fat stays pliant and the smoke stays open. Spread the butter thin and it bridges sausage to crust; spread it thick and it muffles the woodiness. Reach for an aggressive condiment and it picks a fight with the smoke rather than trimming the fat, which is the single job a stripe of mustard or a cornichon is there to do. The loaf has to bring a genuine crust, since coins of smoked sausage lend the sandwich no structure of their own.

Slice into a poached Morteau and the rising steam is dense and woody, the conifer cure out in front, a low porky sweetness banked beneath it. The knife meets a brief resistance at the casing, then the coarse interior opens to show its fat. A thick coin set on the buttered crust sits warm at the lip, its fat softened just to a sheen on the bread, no more. Crust gives first, then the casing splits, then coarse smoked pork goes rich and heavy across the tongue. A cornichon snaps in, sharp and sour; the mustard prickles; and the wood smoke runs underneath the whole mouthful, steady and deep, the last thing to fade.

The Morteau belongs to plain mountain eating in the Franche-Comté, sold warm from market stalls and named with the easy shorthand of a regional staple. It takes its name from the town of Morteau in the Haut-Doubs, the heart of the country where tall pyramidal farm chimneys smoked the winter pork. A Comtois will set it beside the slimmer cumin sausage of the same hills and then tell you the test is the end of the casing: find the wooden peg, and the plate has a Morteau in front of it. Its protected zone covers the Doubs and Jura uplands together with Haute-Saône and the small Territoire de Belfort.

The variations stay inside the Comtois larder. The classic regional plate lays a slice of the hard mountain cheese of the same valleys against it, a pairing catalogued on its own as the Comté and Morteau sandwich. The slim curved cumin sausage gets a separate entry too, the Montbéliard sandwich, aromatic where this one is woody. Neither of those is the subject here, which is the fat pegged sausage taken on its own. It belongs with the charcuterie sandwiches gathered under Sandwich Saucisson & Charcuterie, where its mark is the wood: the deep-smoked one of the Comtois pair.

Origin and history

The Morteau has no inventor and a setting that explains it instead. The sausage is documented in the Haut-Doubs from at least the sixteenth century, where it grew up as a way to hold pork through the long mountain winters. The town of Morteau lent the sausage its name; the sandwich is just that sausage laid on bread, with no first cook and no first date to claim for the bread itself.

The tuyé is the real root of the thing. From the sixteenth century the forested farms of the Franche-Comté raised these tall pyramidal chimneys, twelve to fifteen metres high and wide enough to hang meat in the smoke of the household hearth. The Morteau is what such a chimney turned out at the broad end of its range, cured over the spruce and fir of the surrounding forests, and the wooden cheville survives from the very hook the sausage once swung from.

The dated landmark is the legal protection. The rules fixed for the name cover regional pork, a coarse grind, a natural casing, the wooden peg and slow conifer smoking, and the European Union awarded the saucisse de Morteau its Protected Geographical Indication in 2010, three years ahead of the Montbéliard reaching the same status in 2013.