Boudin blanc de Rethel

Appearance & taste

The sausage is cylindrical, weighs 60 to 130 g and has a diameter of 30 to 36 mm; for this it is filled into pork casing. As a cocktail or mini sausage (8 to 15 g) and in barbecue size (50 to 80 g) it measures 20 to 26 mm and is filled into sheep casing. Its skin is pale, almost white and even, and the outside is largely smooth. Because the casing fits tightly, the sausage can be sliced cleanly. The natural casing may show small flaws, such as reddish veining or small bits of fat from remains of the caul fat.

The filling is soft, juicy and well bound, and its grain can be felt when eating. The sausage has a typical meaty taste with a light hint of pepper and spices. Besides the plain variety, it is made with mushrooms or with a single kind of mushroom, hunter-style with wild mushrooms only, and with truffles of the species Tuber melanosporum or Tuber brumale. The plain variety contains less than 30 % fat and at least 11 % protein. The sausage is sold loose or prepacked.

Production

Fresh pork from the ham, shoulder and belly is used, together with back fat; sow meat and cutting trimmings are excluded, and frozen meat is not allowed. The meat is trimmed so that no tendons, lymph nodes or glands remain in it before chopping. It makes up 55 to 68 % of the filling, whole hen’s egg 10 to 20 % and cow’s milk 20 to 30 %. Egg powder, frozen eggs and milk powder are prohibited.

The filling is bound only by protein from eggs and fresh meat, without starch, starch flour or breadcrumbs. The albumins in the egg white set at 60 to 65 °C and form a structure in which the other ingredients are held; according to the specification, this is where the pale colour and the firmness for slicing come from. Only the chopping and the filling into natural casing give the sausage its texture. For the varieties, mushrooms or truffles are worked into the same base mixture only at the end. All steps from the delivery of the raw materials to the cooling of the finished sausage take place in the area of origin.

Origin & history

The area comprises the cantons of Château-Porcien, Chaumont-Porcien, Novion-Porcien, Juniville, Asfeld and Rethel in the arrondissement of Rethel. Place names point to extensive pig keeping and meat processing in the past: the suffix “Porcien” goes back to the Gallo-Roman term pagus porciensis (“pig country”).

According to the specification, the origins of the sausage go back to the 17th century. At that time an officer of the royal army named Chamarande found refuge in Rethel after fighting a duel against the instructions of Cardinal Richelieu; he later set up a sausage-making business in the village of Liesse, then a suburb of Rethel. One of his descendants, who died in 1848, developed the actual recipe. Five of his sons also became sausage makers and settled in different parts of Rethel. In 1901 the directory of the arrondissement listed eight sausage makers, four of them named Chamarande.

Today the sausage is still made to the old recipe, with knowledge passed on in families or through apprenticeships, but with modern bowl choppers. In the 1990s it was sold first in the region and then throughout France through larger distribution networks.