Disgusting French dishes to avoid unless you are French

1.  10 Disgusting French Dishes to try once

The French have always been dab hands at turning what we consider the most repulsive parts of an animal into what the French consider a ’delicacy’. Foreigners usually find these dishes pretty difficult to swallow. However, if you’re adventurous, you should try these once. And who knows? You might become a big fan like Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall hopefully did. She was on a trip to France to support the charity Emmaus and dropped into the Marche Raspail to sample a bit of sausage.
For top French food recipes, check out the about.com French food expert's site.
Go to Lyon for a real offal feast in a bouchon (restaurant) like the Cafe des Federations. Lyon regards itself as the gourmet capital of France; forget Paris. You'll be amazed.
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Toulouse Sausage. Mary Anne Evans

2.  Andouille or Sausage

Andouille is a sausage made from the intestines and stomach of the pig. Sometimes there are additions: neck, breast, head or heart, all packed into a black skin. Two regions claim to make the authentic andouille, smoked and eaten cold: Normandy (andouille de Vire) and Brittany (andouille de Guémené).
Don't confuse andouille with Toulouse sausage in the image; that is a bit stronger than a normal sausage but quite delicious. It's sold by weight, so you just ask how much you need and the butcher peels it off the massive spiral you see here.

Le Bistroquet in Troyes for andouillette. Ossi Laurila

3.  Andouillette or another sausage

Sausage made from pork intestines (chaudins) often with pork stomach (particularly in Troyes, Champagne, better known for its outlet shopping) and in Burgundy with calf’s mesentery, a piece of peritomeum that joins part of the small intestine to the back wall of the abdomen in a skin. Rouen comes up with a drier version made from pig’s bowels. Andouillette is traditionally served with mustard and potato purée. You’ll find them on most bistro menus.
Andouillette is taken so seriously that it has its own association A.A.A.A.A (Association Amicale des Amateurs d’Authentiques Andouillettes), more simply known as a5 is a gastronomic society founded by Francis Amunategui and 4 other lovers of the delicacy in the early 1970s to preserve the standards.

Typical Offal from a specialist butcher. Mary Anne Evans

4.  Cerveaux or cervelle or Brains

The best brains come from lambs and sheep. Ox brain is firmer and along with calf’s brains, is cheaper to buy, so these two are often used as a filling for pies. It looks pretty vile in a butcher’s window – a handful of what look like large veins, gelatinous and grey with red veins that have to be removed before cooking.
Usually they are lightly dusted with salt and pepper and flour and fried before adding sautéed garlic, parsley and lemon. It’s called Sautéed Cervaux (fried brains) on French menus.

5.  Cuisses de grenouilles or Frogs legs

This dish is dying out in France but you will see it in traditional bistros. Frogs are now a protected species in France, so they come from Asia where they are also considered proper food. What is rather ironic, given the typical British reaction to them, is that new archeological evidence discovered in Wiltshire shows a frog cooked more than 10,000 years ago. The first reference in France is in a cookbook of the 18^th century.
They taste rather like chicken and are usually seasoned, sprinkled with flour and sautéed.

6.  Gésiers or Giblets

Giblets are made up of different parts of poultry (chickens, turkeys, ducks and geese). The word gésiers is used loosely and can refer just to the gizzard, the thick-walled part of a bird’s stomach which grinds down grit and small stones. However, gésiers can also include heart, liver and kidneys plus the external giblets, the head, neck, wingtips and feet. You can buy the external giblets from larger birds separately at the butcher’s to make pot-au-feu and ragouts.
Gésiers are cooked in various ways. They often appear on menus as salads so watch out for the likes of salade de gésiers de volaille which will have green leaves, lardons, tomatoes, eggs and goat’s cheese added to the giblets.

Basashi or Horse Meat. Richard M. Jones licensed under Creative Commons

7.  Cheval or Horse

They may be disappearing, but you can still come across Boucherie Chevalines, or horse butchers shops in France. Some horses are still bred for meat, like the Ardennes and Postier Breton horses. Horse meat was only sanctioned in France in 1811. In 1865 a banquet (Hippophagique, or horse-eating feast) was held in Paris to try to persuade the poor to buy a cheap alternative to beef and pork. The menu included horse-broth vermicelli, boiled horse meat and cabbage and rum gateau with horse bone marrow. The same year the first Boucherie Chevaline opened in Paris.
You might find horse on the menu, usually as a steak tartare or as a cooked steak.

Bofinger Brasserie, Bastille, Paris. Atout France/Stephane Frances

8.  Ris or Sweetbreads

Ris (or sweetbread) is the culinary names for the thymus gland in the throat and the pancreas near the stomach in lambs, pigs and calves. They are soaked in salt water, blanched and cooled before being fried, braised, roasted, poached, grilled or cooked on skewers. You mainly come across them as ris de veau (calfs’ sweetbreads) or ris d’agneau (lamb’s sweetbreads).
Sweetbreads can also refer to testicles (known as Rocky Mountain oysters or prairie oysters in America), but in France they are usually the thymus gland. I would recommend trying these; they are delicious though the texture is a little too soft for many people.
Bofinger Brasserie in Paris serves a great sautéed sweetbread with stir-fried chanterelle and mashed potato in semi-salted butter.

Snails stuffed with garlic and parsley butter. Pool/Wikipedia commons

9.  Escargots or Snails

A well known and much loved dish, the best snails come from Burgundy and are handsome beasts with a streaked colored shell. They are cleaned for 24 hours in a container with no food or water to clear their systems, then removed from their shells and cooked in a good stock, flavored with the likes of thyme, bay leaves and pepper. They’re then put back into their shells and stuffed à la bourguignonne (Burgundy style) with butter flavoured with garlic, shallots and parsley. Around Dijon mustard can be added. Now most people buy them already cooked and tinned with the shells separate and just asemble them for the table.
They’re served very hot in a dish and eaten with fresh French bread to soak up the sauce which, frankly, is the main reason most people order them. They can be a bit rubbery in texture and don’t taste of anything except the sauce.

Tete de Veau. Myrabella/Wikipedia Commons

10.  Tete de veau or calf’s head

The deboned head is first boiled with spices and then cut and served with a sauce, either gribiche which has cornichons, vegetables, garlic, oil and vinegar, mustard and eggs, or ravigote, which is more like a vinaigrette with additions from some chefs such as eggs.
It was originally made with pig’s head, which explains why Revolutionary-minded French fans of the dish eat it on January 21^st, the day in 1793 when Louis XIV was guillotined.
It’s definitely an acquired-taste dish but if you’re with a bunch of die-hard Republicans on that date you might just have to join in.

Tripe from a ruminant's stomach. Mary Anne Evans

11.  Tripeau or tripe

This is the stomach of ox (beef), calf and sheep, usually sold specially prepared or cleaned and looking very white. It’s taken from the first and biggest compartment of the stomach. You can get it from a triperie (tripe butcher). It’s a particularly regional dish; the best known being tripes à la mode de Caen, supported by the Confrérie (brotherhood) of Normandy. In Normandy they add calves’ feet and cook the lot in cider and Calvados and herbs, then serve it with steamed potatoes.