Naughty, Naughty! Eating in the land of sausage and duck fat.

You eat things over here you would never even consider putting in your mouth back in the U.S.  Take, for instance, saucisson a l'ail - garlic sausage.  It has all the pork fat and probably ten times the garlic of anything that ever crossed your lips or your imagination and, good God, it is scrumptious.

As I write these words I have a little platter of goodies to push me along. The chili pepper and garlic olives I bought at the open air market across the border in Divonne a few days ago have bee stung my lips into  puffy, chubby senselessness and my tongue looks and feels like a kiwi fruit, but I don't really mind since I'm quaffing an ice cold Tavel Rose (berry flavored and suffused with hints of roses, lemon and fresh cut grasses - so delicious!),  I don't have to try to talk, and no one can see me anyway. And the garlic sausage! There is so much garlic in it that the force of the flavor is simply intoxicating. Olives, sausage, rose... add in some slices of eggshell crisp on the outside and silky velvet chewiness on the inside, still warm from the bakery, french baguette and you have a stupefyingly delicious melange of eating going on.

Just the other night at a dinner we were goaded on by our European friends into eating the sauteed in garlic and truffles engorged liver of a poor little force fed duck. The famous here, and infamous in the U.S., foie gras. I will grudgingly concede that that duck, perhaps, did not suffer and die in vain. On odd occasions I catch myself licking my lips and contemplating that satiny buttery explosion of flavor one more time. How did I arrive at this place? I can only fall back on that age old defense - "the devil made me do it!"

And the truffles!... oh dear. We had some potato, sausage and cheese tartiflette (baked bubbling casserole) from the haute savoie that was laced with shallots and covered with shaved truffles, and with the first bite I was transported back to some time in my past when I was two or three years old. I looked around cautiously at other people at the table because I instinctively knew that this was really... naughty! To me truffles taste kind of dirty - as in morally wrong. They are suffused with a hint of nasty dirty that takes up where the stinky cheeses leave off. The flavor comes from somewhere over in the forbidden zone and leaves you with an itch you want to scratch again. I had an overwhelming sense of hedonistic pleasure, and the fearful guilt that this was going to get me in really, really big trouble. I suppose my cardiovascular system was screaming at me but I couldn't really hear it over the animated conversation all around and the gurgling of the wine as our glasses were re-filled.

And for dessert?  Fifty to sixty percent butterfat cheeses, creme brule that is little more than cream, eggs and sugar, or chocolate mousse that is little more than.... cream, eggs, and sugar - and chocolate!

As I contemplate another one of these dinners I already have no willpower to resist. I know I'm going to do the whole thing again with only the slightest encouragement. Am I a bad person?  NO!  It can't be!

Ok. Maybe the devil really did make me do it.