This traditional sausage takes weeks to make. It is made with cleaned pig’s stomach and intestines, which are salted and left to macerate in salt for a week before being filled into sausage skins and smoked for three weeks. When it emerges from the smokehouse, the salt is removed from the andouille during a 24-hour soak, before it undergoes a further six hours cooking in a simmering.

After gentle cooking in a net, to retain its shape, the andouille takes on its dark brown colouring on contact with the air, due to oxidation.

It is a specialisation of the Vire valley: the river Vire flows past Isigny sur Mer. Long ago salt would have been made here on the shore, before sending it to the andouille makers upstream or the nearby buttermakers for salting butter.

Isigny Sainte-Mère chef Ivan Vautier has a number of recipes for andouille: here one in which the andouille is served in a pastry parcel with creamy Camembert potato purée and a sauce with Pommeau.

Here is another, a starter in which Vautier uses slices of andouille to adapt a Croque Monsieur. And here is another starter that combines a fricassée of warm potatoes with a Calvados-ripened Camembert and slices of andouille.