Saint Maurice, Superb Artisanal Sausages, And A Sublime Red Wine

I realise that saints, sausages and red wines don’t go together, but they just happened to have been my new travel discoveries and delights from my latest trip through the French Jura mountains and the upper Rhone valley of Switzerland.

Each one was certainly meritorious  in their own right, and anyways I always seek spiritual  discoveries everywhere I travel, as well as the local gastronomy.

If you read my last post on my reflections of life and death, then you know that I traveled to Switzerland through parts of the Jura mountains, where I crossed the border.

The Franche Compté is a very beautiful and mountainous region of France that I have not visited extensively. It is a  rugged and rural area of France famous for their cheeses, sausages,  and unusual wines.

Louis Pasteur and Victor Hugo came from that region.  I did live briefly on the fringe of the area between the Jura mountains and the Haut Savoie Alps near Lac Léman in a small village near the Swiss border. 

The  narrow winding mountain roads often covered with snow kept me from traveling around as much as I did in the Savoie Alps, which seemed strangely more accessible.

The fastest route to the Swiss Valais  department from Paris directed me through parts of the Jura mountains,  then dropping down towards Lausanne and taking the northern route around Lac Léman, rather than the southern route.

I chose an overnight stop at Lac de Saint Pont in Malbuisson,  a scenic area I had wanted to visit when I did live in the Pays de Gex.  The area was much more covered in fresh snow than where I was In Switzerland. 

Franche Compté is as famous for their cheese fondues as is Savoie, or the Swiss. So, it was an obvious choice to choose one of their cheese fondues at the restaurant Du Fromage,  specializing in cheeses dishes of course!

Since we both love the Mont d’Or cheese that comes from the area, we opted for the “boite chaud” rather than the traditional fondue melted in a pot.

The “boite” refers to the box containing the snow white crusted Mont d’Or that becomes meltingly succulent when heated. The wooden box provides a perfect pot after the top crust is slashed and laced with some Savagnin wine.

The huge bucket of local boiled potatoes and generous slices of Jura  cured ham served with it, could have fed four.

Aimée likes the unusual flavour of the local Savagnin wine, which is not at all like the Sauvignon Blanc grape, but I ended up wanting to try some Poulsard red, a  grape indigenous to the area.

It’s light  flavour of ripe cherries with some sous bois is enticing enough, but like all wines from the Jura, more expensive than other regional wines of France.

I have been eating Montbeliard and Morteau sausages from the Jura for quite some time, which are my favourite sausages in the world, but never tried an artisanal one before from a small sausage maker. 

The next day, I stopped at the charcuterie, M. Grésard to pick up some up before heading on, along with some more Poulsard.  Walking into his shop with slabs of smoked meats hanging from the rafters was a heady delicious  smelling experience.

The Franche Compté are famous for their well designed “fumoirs” called tuyé, or smoking pyramids that was a part of every house in times past.

The large sausage is called a Morteau and the smaller ones are Montbeliards, that has some spices added.   Both have to be made in a highly regulated way  to carry the name and both are protected by IGP(indication geographic protegé).

They have to be made from local pork fed buttermilk, and slow smoked for up to 7 days with only conifer and juniper woods.  They do not have nitrates in them and  were so delicious that we stopped again to buy some for home on the way back!

Once in Switzerland, there was an abbey I wanted to see called Saint Maurice in the village of the same name, not too far from where we were staying.

I actually did not know anything about Saint Maurice, an early Christian martyr,  who has been a very venerated saint in the region for  many years.

Mauritious, or Maurice, was a dark-skinned Egyptian, around 285 AD, who was in charge of a troop of men in the Roman Army called the Theban Legend.   They were ordered to help clear the great Saint Bernard Pass that connected the area to present day northwest Italy in the Aosta Valley.

Because he and his men refused to harass some resident Christians and denounce their own professed Christian faith, Saint Maurice was beheaded and every tenth soldier was killed, which the Roman military called “decimation”, the root of a word still in use.

The abbey was built in 515 by the King of Burgundy to honour Saint Maurice since that part of Switzerland was part of the Burgundian Empire at the time.

It became a very significant and powerful abbey, that was visited by royalty throughout the years who came as pilgrims to pray at the tomb of Saint Maurice.

The many silver statuettes and ecclesial treasures on display are testimony to the wealth and significance of this abbey.

It is also an archeological site where  ancient tombs of the monks, painted with red crosses have been uncovered. The ancient sunken baptistry is well preserved. 

It remains a  monastery to this day, where Franciscan monks work and pray as they have for over 1,500 years.  There is a hotellerie for pilgrims and guests on the site.

Learning about Saint Maurice made me think of all the recent North African immigrants who risked their lives crossing the Mediterranean in leaking old boats, many who capsized, in order to seek refuge in Europe.

Dark skinned like Saint Maurice, who was betrayed by his own Roman Empereur Maximian, they were betrayed too by human traffickers and now find themselves being shuffled around from one immigrant camp to another.

Some have gained French nationality by risking their lives again to save others in heroic feats such as saving an infant from falling or others in a Kosher grocery during a terrorist attack.

My introduction to Swiss wines several years ago turned out to be a real misadventure!  While living in the French village near the Swiss border, we attended a Swiss wine salon in Geneva, where we bought a carton of 6, to be delivered.

Inexplicably and mysteriously the one carton order turned out to be 9 cartons, all charged to our credit card and delivered to the psychiatric clinic in Nyon, Switzerland, where Aimée worked.

This very unscrupulous wine producer refused to pick them up, which left us the heavy ordeal of loading the cartons up ourselves and delivering them back to Sion in order to get our money back!

I knew that Swiss foods and wines are more expensive than French ones in general, but I was floored to see that the average or so prices of simple everyday Swiss wines was around 20 Euros!

While living there, whenever we went to the outdoor marché at Ferney Voltaire, a French border town, we would see hoards of Swiss cars, with the Swiss buying wines and foods to take back, hoping that they would not be caught going over the limit in wines.

However, I did discover one grape variety that is indigenous to the area that I loved, called Humagne.  It was recommended in the Restaurant de Fully, a lovely place to eat by the way, where it was made in the surrounding vineyards.

The woman wine maker Mathilde Roux was born in a winemaking family in the Rhone Valley in France.   This dark purple coloured wine had a very perfumed heady nose of violets and silky aftertaste of wild prunes, leather, pepper and sous bois.

A cross between a Cornalin and an indigenous unknown grape, it somewhat reminded me of another mountain variety I found in the Italian mountains near Austria and wines of syrah and grenache.   Whether I am willing to pay so much for another bottle, I don’t know, but it was a good discovery none the less.

Driving back the same route, we stayed overnight in another wine village, Ladoix Serrigny, this one in beloved Burgundy, near Beaune.  I noticed that vintners here pruned back their Pinot Noir grape vines much more severely that what I saw in the Valais.

That night at dinner I drank a beautiful Chorey les Beaune, that even at restaurant prices,  was half of what I paid for the Humagne.

Each trip brings new culinary regional discoveries that invoke me into recreating the foods enjoyed and searching out wines of the region.

Besides the artisanal sausages, I grabbed some double cream de Gruyere to bring home, a delight discovered several years ago.

My first culinary remembrance of Switzerland was eating fondue Bourguignonne, in Zürich when I was a 20 year old student, prompting me to buy  a copper fondue pot there that I used quite a bit and sadly has been lost.

Though I did not have any fondues while in the Swiss Alps, I did learn of a variation called fondue vigneronne.  Instead of using oil in the pot to cook cubes of beef, chicken, or duck, this one ingeniously uses seasoned red wine or white if for seafood.

The more it is used, the more flavourful the wine must get and can be used reduced to making sauces in the end!  Lately I have been looking to buy another fondue bourguignonne pot, and can’t wait to try the “vigneronne” version!