Guts from the abatoir (do not read if squeamish)

We went to the abattoir today to get some of the guts so we can clean them for sausage casing before Thursday when we get the rest of the meat back. We also discussed with the butcher how we wanted the pigs cut up. This was quite confusing as French and British cuts are different (not just different names, but different shapes too) so what we know from Hugh's book we want for the different recipes it was hard to know whether we will actually be getting.
They were given to us in a big poly bag per pig. Quite attractive to look at.

We shlopped them one at a time in to a bucket and tried to work out what was in there as we had no idea what we were looking for. Hugh Fearnley Whitingstall's book is very helpful... up to a point...

Once we had taken out the lungs

and a giant long tongue like thing (which we thought was the liver) with a kind of veil attached to it

and a lot of totally unidentifiable pink soggy lumpy things

it was obvious that what we were left with was the intestine we were looking for. It doesn't look exactly like skin on any sausage I have seen!

Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall again doesn't cover (that I can find) exactly how to make these in to usable sausage skins. It is hard to find any very graphic descriptions on the internet, but as far as we can tell we need to scrape and wash all the pink slime out of them then salt them to preserve them as we may well not use them all for sausages now but will freeze a lot of the sausage meat and make batches through the year. The skin can keep for a couple of years when salted.

The giant tongue we eventually identified as the spleen - we decided it wasn't the liver as it only weight about 250g per pig and the liver is meant to be several kg. We presume we will get the liver with the rest of the meat.

They say you can eat 'everything except the oink' but we won't actually be doing so, as we have disposed of various of the unidentifiable pink things in the bag. We have kept the lungs (probably for the dog), the spleen (for experimental pâte recipe) and the intestine (to clean for sausage casing).

Depending how the experimental pâte comes out I will tell you about it later... or not... if we mess up doing the sausage skin we do have some nice safe synthetic ones on standby - but how hard can it be??? eeeeugh.