My French grandparents’ brown, hard-shell Delsey suitcases from the ‘70s are imprinted into my memory as magical objects. Yes, they packed clothes and toiletries for their stays with us in London, but the bulk of their cases were filled with food—a significant proportion of which could have probably done with being refrigerated.

Logs of goats’ cheese, wedges of Roquefort, precious Leonidas boxes of chocolates—to be carefully rationed—heaving plastic bags of liquorice sweets and Haribo Starmints, delicate pouches of lamb’s lettuce. The more improbable and harder to transport, the better. They once managed to bring over a whole box of live oysters as well as a huge, pungent tupperware of tripe stew which made my sister and I theatrically gag when they opened it.

The absolute essential, the mainstay, however, was a spiral of pinkish sausage flecked with chunks of white fat. The saucisse de Toulouse—or Toulouse sausage—specifically from Maison Garcia, a butcher in the city, was the most anticipated suitcase treasure.

There is a rich gastronomic tradition in southern France’s Languedoc region where Toulouse sits. It includes lots of goose, foie gras, and of course the most famous dish, cassoulet—a hearty mix of white beans, sausage and confit goose—but the thing that tethers me closest is the saucisse de Toulouse.

Thought to have been invented around 250 years ago, Toulouse sausage could very well go even further back. Writing in A History of Food, Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat states: “the sausagemaking tradition has survived uninterrupted for 2000 years in both Rome and France, and the sausages themselves have remained much the same.” Six thousand years ago, Mesopotamian clay tablets refer to meat-stuffed animal casings, but the history of the sausage is as old as civilisation itself.

“Somewhere in our ancient past, a hunter realised that the intestines, stomachs and skins of animals could be fashioned into convenient parcels for all the scraps of meat and organs that might otherwise be wasted.” Gary Allen explains in Sausage: A Global History. Sausages, while universal, are a document of an intense regionality which has become more important and arguably fetishised. Statuses such as Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) recognise the terroir of foods, but an appellation d'origine contrôlée (AOC) evades the saucisse de Toulouse, which is imitated across the world.

Speaking to Loïc Garcia, one of the owners of Maison Garcia, I find out that the real Toulouse sausage is anything but “scraps of meat and organs”. Its chunkier texture (opposite to say, the almost paste-like texture of a Richmond’s Irish sausage) means “you can’t cheat,” he says. “There are no pieces of sinew or pork rind,” it’s just pork belly and hind leg. “The two best pieces of the pig.”

Maison Garcia is where my grandparents always purchased their saucisse, and knowing the specific place to buy it from makes me feel more authentically French. The award-winning butcher has a counter in the covered marché Victor Hugo on the ground floor of a not-so-picturesque ’70s car park, which belies the luxuriant, technicolour array of local produce inside. Here, there are over a hundred stalls and counters selling cheeses, meat, seafood as well as prepared food—you can even get a glass of mid-morning wine after you’ve finished the shopping.

““...the way my grandparents often served it—is with some leftover potatoes that have been fried to a golden crust and a generous smear of mustard.””

Like a lot of the produce of the region, the real success of a Toulouse sausage is its quality and simplicity. Loïc tells me the remaining elements to its recipe are just, “some Occitan salt and quality pepper which is minced just before adding to the sausage. All this in a natural pork casing. It's simple, but very good,” he adds.

He recommends serving it with purée (a slightly richer and smoother version of mashed potatoes.) My preferred way to eat it—the way my grandparents often served it—is with some leftover potatoes that have been fried to a golden crust and a generous smear of mustard.

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Although pork is an ideal candidate for a sausage (because of its flavourful fat which cures well,) the earliest kinds of sausages tended to be a blood sausage, a plentiful byproduct from the slaughter of animals. The infinite types of sausage that exist attest to the creativity of humans. There are dried types, like the French saucisson or Chinese lap cheong, fermented, such as Italian mortadella or German Bierwurst, and smoked, such as Corsican figatelli, a sausage made from pork liver which is smoked for four to five days.

“Chopped or ground up, mixed with other ingredients, and pressed together, meat scraps can provide one of the heartiest parts of a meal—and even one of the most luxurious,” says Harold McGee, in his book On Food and Cooking. This reminds me of the Olhausen sausages my Irish grandmother serves up at her breakfast table in Dublin. Originally created by a Bavarian butcher who emigrated to Dublin for love, they’re pink, smooth and small enough that you could eat six, maybe eight if you try hard enough, in one sitting.

There are also sausages at the edge of the definition, such as Scottish haggis, or Hawaiian laulau—a mix of butterfish and, most often, fatty pork, wrapped in leaves and steamed.

In her book Sausage of the Future, Carolien Niebling expands the possibilities of the humble sausage even further to include cauliflower, insects or edible flowers. She has a knack for making you see the magic and ingenuity contained within a humble object. Nieblieng sees the sausage as “one of mankind’s greatest edible inventions,” describing it as an “opportunistic” miracle.

Carolien has worked all over the world collaborating with butchers and scientists on very localised sausages, she takes the ingenuity of the first people making sausages and runs with it. For last year’s BIO Ljubljana design biennial, Niebling worked with a Slovenian chef and butcher to co-create a sausage made from buckwheat, wild garlic and mushrooms.

““It feels as miraculous as life itself that through a careful balance of bacteria, moulds, lactic acid and additives, sausages become delicious and safe to eat.””

The serendipity of sausages is something that Niebling dwells on, the factors that have to come into play to make a sausage, be it curing, smoking, salting, the low oxygen in a sausage which helps reduce spoiling, even “the enzymes that even stick the meat particles together,” she explains. It feels as miraculous as life itself that through a careful balance of bacteria, moulds, lactic acid and additives, sausages become delicious and safe to eat.

Serendipity also comes into play when thinking about the cultural usefulness of the sausage. “[Sausages] allowed people to travel for the first time for longer, because it was the first handheld food item that you could bring along without refrigeration, that would last for weeks or months.” she explains.

I think about the fluke of my Irish father and my French mother meeting on the Uxbridge Road in London (or so the story goes). Migration is such a fundamental story in my family’s history, and such a central tenet of human culture. When I’m trying to feel authentically French, what does that mean? Toulouse is not my true home in any sense—my mother was sixteen when they moved there. My maternal grandfather grew up there but was born in Iraq, and originally came from Iran. My grandmother came from Paris and before that Alsace-Lorraine, her father was both fluent in German and French. Now that they are both dead and their flat has been sold, all physical proof of the summers spent there, and in a sense, my Frenchness, has been erased.

I don’t even know if what I consider Frenchness really still exists in contemporary France. The slightly stilted, accented way I now speak French marks me as an outsider. Growing up cross-culturally can be a confusing experience; people are always telling you what they think you are or asking why you look like you don’t belong. A few summers ago, in a bar in New York, some French kids were jumping table to table shouting ‘on fait du parkour!’ I told them to be careful not to fall and hurt themselves. Their mum walked over to thank me, we started chatting and then she asked which part of Canada I was from—an incredible insult if you’re French, and maybe even worse if you’re only partially French.

Like many people who are the children of immigrants, food has been a way for me to participate and feel part of a culture that I only ever inhabit part-time. Whether it’s my granny’s prize-winning brown bread (soda bread if you’re English) in Dublin, the correct way to slice your melon charantais, or learning to make Iranian dishes like gormeh sabzi, it feels like a tangible way to belong.

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When I was pregnant I agonised for a long while. Would I teach my daughter French, or would I speak to her in English, the language in which I felt more like my truest self?

Around this time, I’d pop in once or twice a week to my local butchers to stock up on things like lamb for stews and chicken carcasses for soup. If it was a quiet weekday mid-morning, I’d stay and chat, about anything and everything. Anxiously pregnant after a few misses, and the UK only just coming out of lockdowns, visiting the butchers became my social highlight. During one of our meandering chats we found out our grandfathers shared the same name, Emile. The butchers do a merguez, in homage to their Tunisian grandfather and they also sell Toulouse sausage. It’s not the most slavishly authentic: the meat isn’t coarse with chunks of fat and I’m not sure where you get Occitan salt just off the Old Kent Road, but they are very lovely in a lentil stew.

Though my young daughter could theoretically own passports from five countries if she wanted, she herself isn’t the product of migration. As she grows she is picking up bits and pieces of French from books, songs and conversations between me and my mother. One day at breakfast, completely unprompted and to herself, she says: “un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq.” “My mum is going to love this,” I think.

When I try to examine it up close, to give name to the thing that I try to hold onto so dearly, I don’t even know what it is. It’s a confusing mix of nostalgia and childhood and identity. I’ve always wanted to feel whole: fully French, or fully Irish or fully Iranian, but as I get older and more ambivalent about my identity I think the most important thing is the mixing itself. An awareness that your immediate culture is not the only one.

When I was weighing up whether or not to commit to speaking to my daughter only in French, my sister pointed out that fostering a strong attachment was more important than languages. What do I prize the most, the Toulouse sausage that is the most authentic, or the one that I can actually eat?

A few weeks after counting in French at the dinner table, my daughter has her buggy out and is carefully strapping her doll in. My mother says to her, “je pousse” (I’ll push). When my daughter replies, “No! I pousse!”—her first bit of Franglais—all my worries about trying to pass down an ‘authentic’ Frenchness are defused. It’s the mixing that’s important, the understanding that we’re all a jumble of meat and organs inside a flesh casing.