Gustave Courbet at the table

In the Doubs region, meals revolve around the fire and the *tuyé* (the large conical smokehouse chimney of the Haut-Doubs farms). You start with rye bread and a melted cheese for everyday fare; smoked charcuterie keeps all winter and is cooked on market days; game brought back from the hunt makes the feast; you finish with a sweet galette, and thirst is quenched with a tankard. This is a generous, unpretentious, rustic cuisine, in the image of the strapping Ornans man who ate heartily and drank dry.

In Franche-Comté farms, meats and sausages hang for weeks in the *tuyé*, slowly smoked by a fire of resinous wood and juniper. It is this resinous smoke that gives soul to the charcuterie of Courbet's country — and that perfumes even the Sunday cancoillotte.